What’s going on here, with this human?
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Highlights
- A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.â
- There are three parts to expanding your ability to see people more clearly: seeing your own reflection in the window, seeing the elephants in the room, and seeing the water.
- But you really canât see another person clearly unless you can first see yourself clearly: both of you are together creating the interaction you are in. If youâre holding your breath while you speak, you may cause the other person to hold their breath and then you might experience them as nervous. If your question implies a value you place in competitiveness, that part of them may come forward in the answer in a way that would not in other settings.
- In my experience, holding your own perspective alongside those of references should feel slightly uncomfortable and disorienting, or youâre doing it wrong. You should find the candidate confusing at times. If you first see their dysfunction, you should know you have yet to find their genius, and vice versa.
- Fourteen years later I still remember a reference I did for our CFO hire: the woman who had worked with him had a tone of âwhy are you wasting your time talking to me and not spending your time trying to convince him to join you?â She felt slightly sorry for me that I didnât get it yet. Iâve listened for that tone ever since on other references, and in the rare moments I hear it, itâs always proven to be high signal.
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When youâre taking someone from one ecosystem to another, changing their context, you have to try to see the water in both. Itâs disruptive and risky to take someone out of the setting in which theyâre thriving, since there are a lot of subtle things going on in the original that may not be immediately obvious. How much of their success depends on the water in the first ecosystem? Was there someone there who believed in them that set a positive feedback loop in motion that may not persist across systems? Try to understand as much as possible about âwhatâs going on hereâ in the candidateâs prior ecosystem.
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One marker that Iâm seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that Iâm further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical.
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One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish.
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the distinction between high self-monitorsâpeople who adjust to their audience, and are thus high flexibility, lower integrityâand low self-monitorsâpeople who in good and bad ways donât adjust to their audience and are thus high integrity, lower flexibility.
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Resourcefulness is the single most important competency, so hereâs my advice: look for evidence of Resourcefulness 100% of the time as you evaluate candidates. Imagine that you have special magical glasses that register through the lens whether the candidate is, at this moment, revealing Resourcefulness and maybe then it flashes green, or lack of Resourcefulness and maybe then it flashes red.
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Therefore, when communicating, people with self-transforming minds are not only advancing their agenda and design, they are also inquiring about the design itself. Information sending is not just on behalf of driving; it is also to remake the map or reset the direction.