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I was raised in a stable middle-class family in central Florida. My brother and I rode our bikes to school, went to church on Sundays, and were tucked in bed by 7:30 p.m. sharp. We led a routine, predictable life, and I grew up thinking everyone lived this way. I was also taught to believe some specific things about life, most memorably that certain people always tell the truth and are always right: parents, police, and priests.
Uh-oh.
Do parents always tell the truth? Nope. Do police officers? Unfortunately, that isnât the case. Are all priests trustworthy? Horrifyingly not.
This was a limited paradigm, or mindset. Paradigms are the lenses through which we view the world, based on how we were raised, indoctrinated, and trained to see everything in front of us. We all wear these metaphorical pairs of glasses, and they vary in accuracy. They might be the right prescription or slightly off. In some cases, you might have a metaphorical cataract.
Mostly our mindsets are unconscious or subconscious. None of us (hopefully) set out in the morning to have biases or prejudices, but every one of us has them deeply ingrained in us from our experiences while we were raised. We often arenât even aware of them or their ongoing impactânegative and positive.
With the âparents, police, and priestsâ paradigm, I fortunately didnât have to put it to the test. I was generally surrounded by good examples of all three, but if I hadnât been so lucky, this paradigm could have caused serious damage. As it was, I didnât realize that parents were actually real people with flaws and weaknesses until my mid-twenties.
And it wasnât until I was in my thirties that I understood that leaders are people tooâthat they donât make all the right decisions or have all the right answers.
Your job as a leader is to continually assess your paradigms for accuracy and ensure they reflect reality. So ask yourself what you believe about leadership, your team, and yourself. Maybe you believe that the colleagues who think like you are âhigh potentialsâ and those who challenge you arenât. Perhaps you believe youâre not really leadership material and someday everyone will find out.
TRY IT OUT
Assess Your Paradigms
List the members of your team. Write down your beliefs about each of them. Step back and ask, âWhat has happened thatâs made me think sheâs always late, heâs sloppy, heâs a know-it-all, or sheâs a genius?â
Are you giving them a fair shake? How much of your own fear, insecurity, jealousies, last interaction, or series of very valid encounters makes your assessment of them true or incomplete?
Now do the same for your paradigms about yourself. Do you have any strongly held beliefs that, if challenged or corrected, could increase your potential? Ask yourself, âIs this belief true? If not, how can I change it?â
I once went skiing with a good friend at Snowbird, a popular resort in Utah. Although sheâd never skied down anything steeper than a bunny slope, I somehow convinced her that she could handle the Black Diamond run. âCome on, come on, come on!â I urged her. âNo problem. Black Diamond! Woo-hoo!â And after luring her to the top, I gave her an encouraging shove.
She was taken down on a stretcher.
Horrified, I recently realized that I do this in my leadership role too. (And donât worry, my friend wasnât seriously injured and bounced back, no worse for the wear, although sheâs never skied again, at least with me.) While many leaders lack confidence in their people and tamp them down, Iâm the opposite: I believe anyone can do anything if I just provide enough encouragement. I paint the vision and create excitementâwhatever it takes to inspire them to my degree of confidence in them. My intention is to help people achieve their full potential⊠and who cares if they agree?
This paradigm sometimes works. But sometimes I accidentally lure people into terrible Black Diamond experiences instead. âNo, you actually can do this. Itâs easy. Itâs only a speech to two thousand people. Youâll do just fine.â
When Iâm putting people into jobs, assigning them to new territories or countries, putting them on stages in front of two thousand people, and contracting high-paying consulting gigs for them, the stakes are high. At worst, this paradigm can destroy peopleâs confidences, reputations, and even careers, if weâre not aligned.
I often need to rethink my approach and remember something we teach at FranklinCovey: the See-Do-Get Cycle. Itâs the root of real behavior change. When you challenge your mindset (tough work, by the way) you can make lasting changes to your actions and your results.
To best understand this cycle, letâs start with our desired result, the âGetâ part of the cycle. We all have different outcomes weâre trying to achieve: improved health, meaningful relationships, financial stability, influence in our communities and careersâas well as short-term results we want from our day, meeting, or project.
What drives those results (Get) are our behaviors, the âDoâ in this cycle. Itâs how we act. If we want to complete a report by the deadline, then we have to behave in a certain way throughout the day: check with the finance department about last quarterâs profit and loss statement, resist distractions, etc. If we want to build rapport with our co-workers, we can invite them out to lunch. If we want to nail our presentation, we practice it over and over. You get the point.
Most people see that behavior and results are interconnected: what we do drives what we get. That is not an epiphany.
Hereâs what I think most people donât appreciate: the first crucial step, âSee.â This means that beyond our behavior, our results are affected by our mindset.
How we see things affects our behavior, which in turn affects our results.
Paradigm. Behavior. Result.
See. Do. Get.
If you want to get short-term results, change your behavior. Youâll stop smokingâuntil a tense day at work. Youâll wake up at 5 a.m. through sheer willpowerâonce, then hit snooze the rest of the week. Youâll stop swearingâuntil you get cut off in traffic. Behavior changes will only net you a temporary fix.
As Dr. Stephen R. Covey taught, if you want to fundamentally change your results, if you want long-term sustainable impact, you have to challenge your mindset.
Having identified my âBlack Diamondâ paradigm, I wasnât happy with it. Sometimes it works, but not often enoughâand my friend hanging up her skis made me rethink it. I reevaluated my paradigm about setting people up for success (See). Instead of relying on woo-hoos and enthusiasm, I help my team members develop their skills⊠after giving them a chance to opt out of my grand plans (Do). As a result, Iâve learned to grow people who are actually willing and ready (Get), and fortunately decreased the number of people I push down ski slopes.
Imagine a leader who has been assigned an important project to manage. If she closes this project success...
