Category Archives: Definitions

#183 How are you perceived?

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In training leaders, I place a lot of emphasis on looking within. While learning by osmosis, and learning by observing others, has value, doing so without understanding your intrinsic capabilities to perform leadership roles can lead to developing bad habits. An over dependence on role models can lead to blind faith.

Assuming you have looked within and gained an understanding of who you are, and have come to terms with what you have discovered about yourself, answering one question may help shorten your journey to being a leader: how do your co-workers perceive you?

This question is difficult to answer. Some obstacles are:

  • Your co-worker is unable or unwilling to give you useful, actionable feedback, or
  • You don’t understand the feedback, or
  • The feedback is not palatable and you reject it as invalid, or
  • Your over analyze the feedback given to you and take no action, or
  • You take the wrong action to fix the problem, or
  • You just don’t have the discipline, energy, and resilience to learn what your co-workers think about you.

While it may be difficult, it is not impossible to answer this question. It takes a high degree of self awareness, flexibility, and willingness to experiment with your behaviors. It helps if you can leave your emotions out of it and not take feedback personally. In fact, you can blunt any personal attack and disarm any opponent by providing a rational, unemotional description of the feedback, and ask suggestions for improvement.

As you do this over time, you realize that you have created your own barriers to decode the signals being sent by your co-workers. Taking down these barriers is all you need to do, the benefits will automatically follow.

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#176 Immersion

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Cross functional partnership is an oxymoron. Typically one of the participants has the more dominant role and will make the final call on crucial decisions. For example, the finance and marketing departments may claim to have a “partnership” but marketing will ultimately decide how to invest in the marketplace. The finance department may advise and monitor best practices to ensure ROI, but it is a really bad idea to let finance make the call on customer generation and retention investments. This is because marketing is closer to the customer than finance.

Both parties are able to amicably work out issues for the most part. One reason for this is that a best practice in finance is to assign a financial analyst to the marketing department. This person’s job is to develop a deep understanding of what marketing does, understand the vocabulary and intent, and provide guidance in the language used by marketing. The marketing department will not hire anyone to do the same with finance.

No matter how hard the financial analyst works, they will never see the world the way marketing does. In an ideal world, the financial analyst would be a former marketing person. This idea is so impractical, it simply will not happen. Marketing people do not become financial analysts, or vice versa.

The original problem still remains. In cross functional collaboration, how do you see the world though your partner’s eyes? How do you see this without having done their job?

A few best practices are to sit in the other department’s staff meetings, take a couple of courses to learn the vocabulary, shadow one or two people to see what they do, visit their customers to understand the real life problems. In other words, try to immerse yourself in their world to improve your empathy.

This is true for any two departments of your choice.

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