The Thinking Advantage

4 Essential Steps Your Team Needs to Cultivate Collaboration, Leverage Creative Problem-Solving, and Enjoy Exponential Growth

Jill Young

• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781647463519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

How do you blow up your company's growth?

 

Start with high quality training. Follow that up with thoughtful coaching by managers who refuse to rescue and value learning experiences. Implementing this proven algorithm creates a thinking company that generates exponential growth. 

 

Author Jill Young shares her vast experience in helping entrepreneurs discover and celebrate the creation of thinkers in their company, identify gaps in their system, and close those gaps.

 

The Thinking Advantage is a unique step-by-step guide to help you

?   leverage creative problem-solving to overcome obstacles

?   recognize ways to improve your interaction with and among your employees

?   identify areas you can grow as a coach to create better results

?   modify your company's training to develop and improve collaborative thinking

?   rethink your follow-up strategy to close better deals

?   create a culture of accountability that attracts high performers

?   activate productivity and rich conversations that produce permanent and foundational change 

 

Ensure exponential growth by increasing the thinkers in your organization starting today!

Use Return and Reflect in Two Easy Steps

1. Return: Make the Invitation!

Invite the person back with a simple phrase like, “When you’re done, come on back and let me know how it went.” The invitation alone sets their mind on a path of thinking I’m going to report all of this, and that gives the action more intention (and attention). Their brain automatically starts taking note of things to report, even if it’s not totally conscious. As a bonus, they feel you care about and place importance on the situation, and it becomes a trust-building experience.

Whenever I teach this tool, bosses often report that they ask people to come back, but they rarely do. If you find yourself experiencing the same thing, here are a few things to remember:

Don’t worry about it.

As a coach, I make it a point to end every coaching conversation with an invitation. Sometimes they accept my request, and sometimes they don’t. When they do, they feel the power of reflection and walk away with more learning. The experience is elevated, and they can apply what they’ve learned to more than just one scenario. I love the Return and Reflect conversations because this is where the transformation really occurs as they can see their experience with a new perspective now that the experience is over. Some leaders take me up on my coaching and others don’t, but I’ve come to a happy place by knowing that they’ll reflect in due time.

You may be making this step too linear.

Yes, in the algorithm I just shared—in a utopian world—someone would return and reflect with you on a specific issue you coached them on, and then the issue would be tied with a neat and tidy bow.

But the Return and Reflect step can be used at any time, even if there was no specific coaching before it. For example, I make proactive calls to my clients about a week before their session, so we’re on the same page with the hot issues and how the quarter went. Invariably during this call, I ask, “How’s the team? Are they ready for next week?” These questions cause the leader to pause and think, How is my team? Are they ready for next week? Then they discuss the quarter, reflecting on the stories and events they experienced. This call certainly gives me the information I need, but the real benefit is that by creating the space for this leader to reflect on the quarter, they become clearer about their issues and what to focus on for next quarter. I didn’t need to do any coaching before and the reflection was useful.

Make it a habit.

Make reflections part of your normal meetings. If you have regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings, ask “What would be helpful to reflect on during our time together?” If you run on EOS, you’ll hold Quarterly Conversations™ where you’ll create a space for your team to reflect on what’s working and what’s not.

Set a date.

When I have a critical coaching session that must have a follow-up, I ask the leader to commit to a day and time for returning and reflecting. We put it on the calendar to make space for it before we leave the conversation.

2. Reflect

When they do return, ask your people to reflect vs. report. A report is just a statement of facts or a replay of what happened. Get them focused on reflecting on what happened. Help them think deeper about observations, behaviors, aha moments, etc., that will serve them in multiple situations, not only this one. When they do the talking, the lessons stick.

This can be as simple as asking, “How did it go?” If they are ready to go deeper, you can ask, “What did you learn? On reflection, when did you know this project was off track? What will you do differently next time?” Bosses want to know the outcome of the issue. Coaches want to help people learn lessons for the future. Do both! Spend most of the time in reflection rather than reporting, and they’ll start to think faster.

Here are some ways that you can create great spaces for using the power of reflection to enable the experience to stick.

Hold Regular Reflection Sessions

A reflection session is a chunk of defined time dedicated to reflection and celebration. It’s a space that invites open and honest feedback, involves curiosity and truth-telling, and encourages verbal acknowledgement and celebration of wins. And it doesn’t take much time at all for these to be very effective. They can focus on a timespan (Reflect on the last 90 days) or they can be about something specific (What did we learn from our last version launch?).

Step One—The Question

At a very general and simple level, you can ask, “How did it go?” This is open-ended and allows the other person to take the answer wherever they want. An upgrade to this question is “What did you learn?” This gets them to think at a deeper, more intrinsic level.

To really add clarity, ask the question as a distinction, using opposite ends of a spectrum on their reflections: “What worked, and what didn’t work? What did you like; what didn’t you like? What was easy, and what was hard?” I’ve noticed that when I ask the question based on the distinction, this produces the deepest level of thinking. This question gives a tighter framework or direction to the brain, so the brain can find the answers more quickly.

This step is brief, and often takes less than 30 seconds. All you need to do is ask the question, give simple instructions for step two, and let the brain do the rest!

Step Two—Five Quiet Minutes

After asking the question, give your people five quiet minutes to think about the answers to the question, and then ask them to write the answers down. Directions for this section include

• There are no wrong answers.
• There is no requirement of content.
• You can write one thing or fifteen things.
• You must write it down.

There are three main cognitive functions going on during this step.

Recall

The thinking brain actively engages in remembering past events, feelings, activities, and conversations. The more opportunity we give our brains to recall events, the faster it’ll work and the more accurate the memories will be.

Elevation

As the brain looks back on an event or a time period, it naturally sees highlights and meaningful moments. As it recalls these, it metaphorically rises above the situation and can observe it from an outsider’s perspective. People who reflect can observe their actions or reactions outside the heat of the moment.

Logic

Something powerful happens when you’re asked to put your thoughts into words. By moving the memory through the brain’s logical prefrontal cortex where our language center is, the thought becomes more rational, more true, more realistic, and more clear. Just the act of deciding what to write down increases the validity and effectiveness of the reflection.

During the five-quiet-minutes portion of a recent reflection session with a new client, I noticed that one of the leaders wasn’t writing down his thoughts. When I encouraged him to write as he was thinking, he said he had bad penmanship, so he didn’t like to write. When we started sharing what each of us had written, his thoughts were unclear, he rambling, and he was disappointed that he didn’t see the positivity in the situation as the rest of the team did. The next time we had a reflection session, I encouraged him to write, even if he couldn’t read his handwriting. The second time around, he shared with the group that he was stunned at his clarity and how much more confidence he had in the company’s growth in the last quarter.

Step Three—Share What You Wrote with Someone Else

This can be simple—participants read from the page they wrote on—or complex—participants discuss, in depth, each thing they wrote. When time is limited, I ask people just to share one thing they wrote. When you ask someone to choose one or two items to share, their brain now needs to filter everything they reflected on and decide which is the most significant reflection. When this occurs, what they share is tagged in the brain as significant enough to store to memory. This is how we take advantage of the experiences that people have within our company. This is how we create a company that has the Thinking Advantage.

Types of Reflection Sessions

1. One-on-one

These sessions are intense and effective and can get to the heart of the impact of the event quickly. This is what you experience when you have a personal coach or a trusted friendship. Reflecting with one person also opens the door for the coach or boss to do additional teaching in a private setting. If the reflections aren’t clear, you can help bring clarity. If the reflections show that some thinking is very reactive, you can jump into helping them choose a different response. When the reflecting is mostly negative, you can help reframe the event with them as a learning for the future. This type of reflection is built into EOS as the Quarterly Conversation. Some teams find this type of reflection so valuable that they like to do one-on-one sessions weekly! Th...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Other Books by Jill Young
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Case for Thinking in Your Company
• The Four Steps
• Step One Teach
• Teaching Adults
• Eight Approaches for Adult Learners
• Practical Applications
• What We’ve Learned
• Step Two Coach
• What is Coaching?
• The Coaching Magic Matrix
• Observe Mode
• Observe vs. Ignore
• Observe like a Pro
• Respond Mode
• Choosing Your Response
• Initiating the Coaching Conversation
• Unlimited Do-Overs
• Helping Employees Choose Their Response
• Co-Create Mode
• When People Weigh In, They Buy In
• My Wakeup Call
• Co-Create, Don’t Dictate
• Simplicity in Co-creating Solutions
• Return and Reflect Mode
• Step Three Don’t Rescue
• A More Thoughtful Hero
• Don’t Take the Monkey!
• When You Can See Farther Down the River
• The Fire Department Tool
• Step Four Return and Reflect
• Experience is a Hot Commodity!
• Use Return and Reflect in Two Easy Steps
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices