Agree, Build and Compare

What do you do when you disagree with another person’s stories or facts?    In Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler write about using your ABCs to agree, build and compare your views when you disagree with the other peron's facts or stories.

Remember Your ABCs 
Remember you’re ABCs:

• Agree – agree when you agree.
• Build – build when others leave out key pieces.
• Compare – compare when you differ.

Agree
While you need to work through disagreements, start with an area of agreement.  Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler  write:

So here’s the take-away.  If you completely agree with the other person’s path, say so and move on.  Agree when you agree.  Don’t turn an agreement into an argument.

Build
If you agree with what’s been said but the information is incomplete, Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler suggest building:

On the other hand, when you watch people who are skilled in dialogue, it becomes clear that they’re not playing this everyday game of Trivial Pursuit – looking for trivial differences and then proclaiming them aloud.  In fact, they’re looking for points of agreement.  As a result, they’ll often start with the words “I agree.”  Then they talk about the part they agree with.  At least, that’s where they start.

Compare
When you differ significantly, don’t suggest others are wrong.  Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler suggest comparing your two views:

Finally, if you do disagree, compare your path with the other person’s.  That is, rather than suggesting that he or she is wrong, suggest that you differ.  He or she may, in fact, be wrong, but you don’t know for sure until you hear both sides of the story.  For now, you just know that the two of you differ.  So instead of pronouncing “Wrong!” start with a tentative but candid opening such as “I think I see things differently.  Let me describe how.”

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Agree when you agree.  State what you agree with.  This helps build rapport.
• Build on what you agree with.   Start with what you agree with to build momentum.  Don’t focus on trivial flaws and blow them out of proportion.
• Compare your views rather than state others are wrong.  To stay connected, get curious on how you see things differently.

My Related Posts

• Crucial Conversations
• Learn to Look
• Make It Safe
• Master My Stories
• Mutual Purpose
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Can Effectiveness Be Learned?

Can you learn to be effective?  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes that effectiveness is a habit and that you can improve through practice and examples.

If Effectiveness Were a Gift ...
Drucker writes that if effectiveness were a gift, our civilization would be highly vulnerable:

If effectiveness were a gift people were born with, the way they are born with a gift for music or an eye for painting, we would be in bad shape.  For we know that only a small minority is born with great gifts in any one of these areas.  We would therefore be reduced to trying to spot people with high potential for effectiveness early and to train them as best we know to develop their talent.  But we could hardly hope to find enough people for the executive tasks of modern society this way.  Indeed, if effectiveness were a gift, our present civilization would be highly vulnerable, if not untenable.  As a civilization  of large organizations it is dependent on a large supply of people capable of being executives with modicum of effectiveness.

How Do You Learn Effectiveness?
Drucker raises questions about learning effectiveness:

If effectiveness can be learned, however, the question arises:  What does it consist in?  What does one have to learn?  Of what kind is the learning?  Is it a knowledge -- and knowledge one learns in systematic form and through concepts?  Is it a skill that one learns as an apprentice?  Or is it a practice that one learns through doing the same elementary things over and over again?

Consulting and Effectiveness
According to Drucker, consultants are only effective consultants achieve results:

As a consultant, I work with executives in many organizations.  Effectiveness is crucial to me in two ways.  First, a consultant who by definition has no authority other than that of knowledge must himself be effective -- or else he is nothing.  Second, the most effective consultant depends on people within the client organization to get anything done.  Their effectiveness therefore determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes and achieves results, or whether he is pure "cost center" or at best a court jester.

There is No "Effective Personality"
According to Drucker, there is no "effective personality":

I soon learned there is no "effective personality."  The effective people I have seen differ widely in their temperaments and their abilities, in what they do and how they do it, in their personalities, their knowledge, their interests -- in fact, in almost everything that distinguishes human beings.  All they have in common is the ability to get the right things done.

Effectiveness is a Habit
According to Drucker, effectiveness is a habit:

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices.  And practices can always be learned.  Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice.  But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well.  They have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until "x x 6 = 36" has become unthinking, conditiioned reflect, and firmly ingrained habit.  Practices on learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.

Practice Your "Scales"
According to Drucker, you improve effectiveness through practice:

To every practice applies what my old piano teacher said to me in exasperation when I was a small boy.  "You will never play Mozart the way Arthur Schnabel does, but there is no reason in the world why you should not play your scales the way he does."  What the piano teacher forgot to add -- probably because it was so obvious to her -- is that even the great pianists could not play Mozart as they do unless they practices their scales, and kept on practicing them.

Practice Builds Competence, but Talent Builds Mastery
According to Drucker, practice will lead to competence, but won't necessarily lead to mastery:

There is, in other words, no reason why anyone with normal endowment should not acquire competence in any practice.  Mastery might well elude him; for that one might need special talents.  But what in effectiveness is competence.  what is needed are "the scales."

Key Take Aways
Here's my key take aways:

• Effectiveness is the ability to get the right things done.
• Effectiveness can be learned.
• There is no "effective personality."
• You improve your effectiveness through practice.
• Make effectiveness a habit.
• Practice will lead to competence, but not necessarily mastery.

My Related Posts

• Productivity Objectives
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• Objectives are Like Flight Plans

3 Answers for the Second Half of Life

How do you prepare for the second half of your life?  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about 3 potential paths for the second half of your life.

3 Answers for the Second Half of Your Life
Drucker provides 3 answers for the second half of your life:

1.    Start a Second Career
2.    Develop a Parallel Career
3.    Become a “social entrepreneur”

Start a Second Career
According to Drucker, one path is to start a different career:

The first is actually to start  a second and different career.  Often this means only moving from one kind of organization to another.  Typical are the middle-level American business executives who in substantial numbers move to a hospital or university, or some other nonprofit organization, around age forty-five or forty-eight, when the children are grown and the retirement pension is vested.  In many cases they stay in the same kind of work.  The divisional controller in the big corporation becomes, for instance, controller in a medium-sized hospital.  But there are also a growing number of people who actually move into a different line of work.

Develop a Parallel Career
Drucker writes that another path is a parallel career:

A large and growing number of people – especially people who are very successful in their first careers – stay in the work they have been doing for twenty or twenty-five years.  Many keep on working forty or fifty hours a week in their main and paid job.  Some move from being busy full-time to being part-time employees or become consultants.  But then they create for themselves a parallel job – usually in a non-profit organization – and one that often takes another ten hours of work a week.

Become a “Social Entrepreneur”
Drucker writes another option is to start a non-profit activity:

And then, finally – the third answer – there are the “social entrepreneurs.”  These are usually people who have been very successful in their first profession, as businesspeople, as physicians, as consultants, as university professors.  They love their work, but it no longer challenges them.  In many cases they keep on doing what they have been doing all along, though they spend less and less of their time on it.  But they start another, and usually a nonprofit, activity.

People Who Manage the “Second Half” Will Be the Success Stories
Drucker suggests you can turn the long working-life expectancy into an opportunity for yourself and society:

People who manage the “second half” may always be a minority.  The majority may keep doing what they are doing now, that is, retire on the job, continue being bored, keeping on with their routine, and counting the years until retirement.  But it is this minority, the people who see the long working-life expectancy as an opportunity for themselves and for society, who will increasingly become the leaders and the models.  They, increasingly, will be the “success stories.”

Key Take Aways
Here's my key take aways:

• Consider whether you'll want to start a second career, a parallel career, or become a "social entrepreneur."
• Turn the second half of your life into an opportunity.
• Test the paths you think you'll pick.