The Tingley Advantage Inc.

Improving the Way You Do Business

Rituals for Businesspeople

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Quick Facts

  • Anxiety is always a challenge, and it may be heightened during times of uncertainty and rapid change.
  • Anxious circumstances can make stress-inducing tasks like giving presentations or having difficult conversations even more stressful.
  • Rituals can be used as a tool to create feelings of calm and control.
  • Rituals can be empathy-, exertion-, spiritual-, or mantra-based, depending on what works for your personality and preferences.

Detailed Analysis

We’ve heard again and again that anxiety levels are high, and the shift to remote work has only exacerbated the problem. Consider some scenarios: a manager who already finds giving presentations nerve-wracking now has to give them via video, adding a layer of technical difficulty and making it harder to connect with the audience; a leader has to give bad news or difficult feedback to an employee over the phone rather than in person; a businessperson whose children are now at home full-time is trying to interview for a new job with the noise of play in the background.

In the remote world, even just starting your workday in what may be a less-than-conducive work environment can be stress-inducing. Any of these scenarios would be stressful under normal circumstances; add some of the current complications to the mix, and for some they become downright daunting. How can we boost our confidence and re-claim our calm in these situations?

Science suggests that using rituals is a natural human propensity that we can consciously leverage to manage stressful situations, likely because they give us a sense of control and predictability when things feel overwhelming or scary. Although not a panacea, using rituals before stressful situations can boost confidence and calm.

What ritual you choose will depend on your personality and preferences, and there is no one-size-fits all ritual for everyone. Effective rituals can include things as different as performing vigorous jumping jacks, to sitting in stillness and breathing deeply.

The important feature seems to be that it is planned and predictable – so you do the jumping jacks or the deep breathing 10 minutes before your presentation, every time you present, for example. Again, it’s the sense of familiarity and predictability that seems to have the calming effect. An HBR report on this phenomenon suggests that there are four basic types of ritual you can try:

  1. Empathy-based rituals focus on connecting with others. Examples could include taking some time to speak with meeting or presentation attendees before your formal presentation (on a video conference, this could mean opening the call 5 or 10 minutes early for some informal chat) or visualizing things from the audience’s point of view (for example, before a difficult phone conversation, visualizing the other person’s perspective).
  2. Exertion rituals focus on moving your body and expelling some of the excess energy and tension that can build prior to a stressful conversation or event. A quick walk, jumping up and down, dancing around – anything that utilizes your body’s movement counts as an exertion ritual.
  3. Spiritual rituals can connect us with whatever it is that grounds us – our beliefs, values, or even just our connection to our breath. Prayer, meditation, and deep breathing can all be used as spiritual rituals.
  4. Mantra rituals involve repetition of a meaningful phrase or word – for example “I am present to this moment” or something as simple as “Breathe”.  There is no magic to any set of words – the repetition itself seems to be what is soothing, and the words can give you a positive focal point to direct your energy towards

Whatever ritual you choose to try, it is not a replacement for other important steps – for example, practicing your presentation and being really familiar with its content, or preparing for your difficult conversation. However, a ritual can give us a sense of calm and control in difficult situations, enabling the hard work and preparation we’ve done to shine in its best light.  

Digital Communication 101

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Quick Facts

  • The remote work world means that virtual meetings and communications are now commonplace.
  • It’s crucial to remember that our professional brands are at stake when we use this medium ineffectively.
  • Ultimately, our soft skills, and how we apply them in this specific context, will contribute to our professional success.

Detailed Analysis

As the work world has shifted online and Zoom and similar platforms replace boardrooms, for the most part, business has adapted well. Most of us have integrated some level of video calling into our daily work and personal lives with success. When learning a new skill and technology, mistakes and failures are inevitable (and sometimes, entertaining). However, our professional brands are at stake, so it’s worth revisiting some of the essentials of digital communication.

Dress for business:  Protect your brand by visually presenting what you want to be seen. It’s natural that things have become more casual as people work primarily from home, but this does not mean we should be wearing pajamas on business calls. Casual business attire is a must. You may with to think beyond your personal appearance to the visuals surrounding you. This doesn’t mean you need to have a perfect office; however, it’s worth keeping your workplace at home as neat and organized as is professional – just as you would in the office.

Minimize distraction. Yes, some is unavoidable, and hopefully most workplaces and colleagues are sympathetic to the unavoidable noise of children in the home, construction outdoors, or other unavoidable interruptions. Still, there are things you can do to minimize their impact – mute your microphone when you aren’t speaking, choose the most quiet space available to you, and don’t walk around unnecessarily with your device while you’re in a meeting to prevent the moving background effect.

Use gestures. Even though video conferences are, by definition, visual, it is still harder to communicate via body language as compared to being in the room with someone. Be intentional with your gestures. Smile when you greet someone or make a point of nodding to convey that you are actively listening. (side note: be sure to actively listen! It’s easy to get sidetracked by our phones or papers when on a video call, but this distraction will come across to other participants). A quick hand-raise can indicate you’d like to add something (see below).

Use the features of the technology. A simple tool which meeting moderators should use whenever possible is the ‘raised hand’ tool. Because it be difficult to ‘jump in’ with comments and be heard on video conferences, this feature allows participants to indicate that they have a point to add without interrupting other speakers. Other features such as chat can also be used to ease communication.

Revisit all the etiquette rules for digital communication. The platform may be new but at least the rules are essentially the same – actively listen, be polite, speak clearly, be professional. It’s worth extending the etiquette review to email and text, and these replace many face to face interactions. Compose professional texts and emails, be brief but polite, use spell check, and always pause before hitting ‘send’.

Ultimately, we need to nurture our soft skills, adapting them as needed to cope with the new world. Communication skills, adaptability, empathy, curiosity, problem-solving, humility – all of these are essential to thriving in the remote workplace and will serve you throughout your career.      

Hack Your Habit Loop

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Quick Facts

  • Studies suggest that 40% of our day is driven by habits and routines.
  • The more intentional we are about choosing and implementing habits, the greater the impact they can have on our success.
  • Charles Duhigg’s habit model reveals how we can hack our habit loop for improved effectiveness.

Detailed Analysis

As businesspeople, we are often managing a dynamic mix of responsibilities – meetings, emails, projects, budgets, not to mention personal responsibilities, community participation and family time. And yet, despite the varied activities that populate our to do lists, studies suggest that about 40% of our day is driven by repeated habits and routines that are ingrained (whether intentionally or not) into our daily lives.  It stands to reason, then, that the more intentional we are with our habits, the more successful we will be – after all, who wouldn’t want an additional 40% of time and effort behind their goals?

Of course, as anyone who had tried to change a bad habit, or build a new one, knows, this is easier said than done. The very nature of habits – “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up” – indicates that they can be a challenge to change or establish.

Luckily, business journalist Charles Duhigg, in his 2012 bestseller The Power of Habit concisely broke down the structure of habits and uncovered ways we can use the structure to our advantage in breaking old habits or building new ones.

Habits are made up of three components: The Cue, the Routine, and the Reward. In his book, he cites the simple but powerful example of Proctor & Gamble, who saved their failing, previously-unscented Febreze product so that it offered a reward (a fresh scent) to their desired cue (cleaning) and routine (finishing with a room freshening spray).  The scent is unrelated to the functioning of the product; Febreze works by eliminating odours, not adding them. But the reward was essential in completing the habit loop and drawing consumers in.

This example shows that the cues, routines, and rewards need not be dramatic to be effective. And we don’t need to be a large CPG organization to hack the loop. We can apply the same principles to our business and personal lives.

Many businesspeople have shifted, at least in part, to a remote working life. This shift has upended old habits and requires us to build new ones. How can the habit loop help us? Let’s look at an example:

With the shift to work from home, a crucial habit is shutting off at the end of the day. Although mobile technology means office workers are more connected than ever after-hours, the physical act of leaving the office tells us that work hours are over. When the office is also your kitchen table, that cue has been eliminated and it’s easy to have a quick dinner at the table and then log right back in – especially when many of our extra-curricular activities like driving children to sports or heading to the gym have also been limited. This is a habit we might wish to change.

Identify the cue: What happens right before you log back in? What trigger is it setting off? Try to be mindful of what’s going on for you leading up to logging in – are you bored, stressed, too tired to shift gears? This will be useful information when you try to hack the loop.

Identify the routine: In this case, it’s logging back into work, perhaps to check emails.

Identify the reward: This can be tricky because rewards can be subtle. It might be as simple as passing the time, giving you intellectual stimulation, or perhaps it’s helping you avoid stressors at home, or making you feel more in control of your next workday.

Now that you’ve identified the current loop, you can consciously replace the habit with something healthier and more productive.

Let’s say the cue of finishing dinner is triggering feelings of boredom. Now, instead of logging into email, you might replace this routine with logging into an online course that might help you build a new skill, or even perhaps a fitness class that is challenging enough to keep you mentally engaged. You’ve satisfied your need for the reward of staving off boredom and giving yourself some mental stimulation, and all you’ve changed is the content you are logging into.

The habit loop can be a powerful way of building new habits in addition to changing old ones. The action of the habit is essentially the routine portion of the loop, so by using an existing cue and creating a reward, routines can be more easily established, driving a brand-new habit loop.

For example, let’s say your desired habit is doing a daily check in with one of your team members. Perhaps you already have a habit of taking a break at 3 p.m. to briefly check social media feeds. You can use the 3 p.m. break as a pre-established cue and the social media time as a reward. Although it will feel unnatural to add in the team check in, because you are attaching it to pre-established cues and rewards, it will be easier to add this habit than if you just added it as an extra to do item on your list. In time, it will become part of the habit loop and will be an item that you deal with automatically.

Once established, good habits enable us to take consistent actions which drive our success while using less mental energy to do so. By understanding the habit loop, you can hack into it and use it to your advantage.

The Problem with Perfect

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Quick Facts

  • Aiming for perfection in your decisions and actions can lead to procrastination and lost opportunities.
  • Most of the time, 70 – 80% confidence is enough to make a sound decision or take action.
  • The benchmark needs to be shifted from a comparison against ‘perfect’ to a comparison against not taking action at all (or delaying action for too long).
  • Perfecting is a process of continuous improvement and learning, rather than an end state.

  Detailed Analysis

“Better is good”. – Barack Obama

High-performing businesspeople are always aspiring to be the best. They might look to people who have reached the pinnacles of their fields – people like Barack Obama in politics, Colin Powell in the military, or Jeff Bezos in business – to learn how to attain the level of perfection they aspire to. Whether you admire these individuals or not, it’s hard to argue that they’ve achieved at the very highest levels. And something else they share – a commitment to strive for good, or better, while avoiding the trap of perfect as much as possible. It’s counter-intuitive – don’t the best of the best aim for perfection? But Powell famously coined the 40/70 rule, which asserts that decisions should be made with not less than 40% information, but not more than 70%. Bezos echoes this idea, believing that most decisions can be made at about 70% certainty. And Obama was committed to the idea that better and done beats perfect and not done, or as he succinctly puts it “Better is good”. Why is perfection so problematic?

  • It delays action. If the standard for your action is perfection, how quickly are you going to act? Likely, a quest for perfection is going to significantly slow down action. But opportunities don’t wait for us to get all our ducks perfectly in a row, so trying to get everything perfect and avoid any possibility of mistake is, in most cases, not a smart option. Unless lives are on the line (and even sometimes then), the biggest mistake will be the failure to act at all. And some believe that perfectionism can be a form of procrastination.
  • It stifles creativity. If you’ve set the benchmark for your team at ‘perfect’, how likely are your team members to throw out creative, outside of the box, possibly bad but potentially thought-stimulating, ideas to make things better? The pressure to come out with perfect ideas, fully formed, means that many good ideas may never have the chance to be improved upon and developed into something viable.
  • It’s unrealistic. This is common sense – the truth is, perfection does not exist. The greatest athletes miss shots, the greatest doctors lose patients, the greatest businesspeople make bad calls. Perfectionism is not just an unhelpful standard, it’s an impossible one. It’s possibly the only business strategy with which failure is all but guaranteed.

So, what’s a better approach? After all, we can let go of perfection, but running headlong into plans without thought or reflection isn’t a sound strategy either. How do we find the balance between careless, too-quick action on the one hand, and perfectionism on the other?

  • Differentiate your decisions. Bezos proposes a structure in which decisions are broken into two types – Type 1 decisions are high risk and cannot be undone or course-corrected, and these should be undertaken with painstaking care and a cautious pace. Type 2 decisions are ones where course-correction, tweaks, and even complete reversal are possibilities. These decisions should be made at lower levels of certainty – as mentioned, he suggests 70% confidence; others suggest a bit higher, something like 80%.
  • Practice mental agility. A recent HBR article suggests the following exercise: practice shifting your focus from focused work (for example, reading this post) to big picture thinking (such as the overall landscape of your industry right now). The metaphor that comes to mind is a camera zooming in and out, taking in a detail in one shot and panning a landscape in another. It’s easy to fuss over details when we lose sight of the big picture; practicing this strategy helps us to maintain context so that we can decide what ‘good enough’ looks like for any given action or decision.
  • Measure the risk of acting mistakenly against the risk of not acting at all. With perfection as the benchmark, any action can be seen as sub-par. But when we consider the risks of action delayed or avoided, the risk assessment can change significantly. Consider delicate surgeries – there is an inherent risk, but they are performed anyway precisely because the risk of not acting is worse.
  • Channel your energy into risk mitigation and improvement. Once you’ve accepted that perfection is not an option and made the best decision possible, you can redeploy your mental effort from figuring out what to do, to figuring out ways to reduce the risks, spot problems, and course correct as needed.
  • Embrace continuous improvement. Thinking “perfecting” rather than “perfection. Mistakes are some of the greatest learning opportunities we’ll ever be handed. When things don’t work out ideally, it’s an opportunity to assess what worked and what didn’t and apply those learnings to future decisions, leading to a positive cycle of continuous improvement, innovation and intelligent risk-taking that can drive your business success. If your inclination is towards perfection, see it as a process rather than an end state.
  • View 80% as a solid foundation upon which to build. Rather than thinking in absolutes, view an imperfect start as a foundation. If you can quickly get something to 70 or 80% done, can your team work towards filling in the rest over time, perhaps even more wisely and effectively for having the learnings from the initial attempt?

Sometimes you need to be 100% sure. But often, faster is better than perfect. And better is good.  

Getting People to Change their Behaviour

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Quick Facts

  • It’s natural for individuals and teams to resist behaviour change, but it’s a necessary business reality, and managers need to know how to support it.
  • Start by gaining buy in for the change, to minimize resistance and leverage your team’s capabilities.
  • Then, make the process of adopting new behaviours as manageable and sustainable as the business will allow.

Detailed Analysis

As we’ve looked at before, change is difficult. As humans, we are hard-wired to resist change, and its easy for us to perceive it as a threat. At a common-sense level, we can see this is true – it’s easier and more familiar to continue doing what we’ve always done than to do something different (ever tried to launch a new fitness regime?) Still, change is part of life, and even more so in our rapidly changing technological world. As a manager, you need strategies in your toolkit to help your team change behaviours when the business calls for it.

Gain Buy In

If changing behavior can trigger reluctance and resistance, changing behaviour because you are forced to do so can trigger downright hostility and complete refusal. This works against your employee, you, and your business. To lay the groundwork for behavioural change, you need buy in. How?

  • Start with context. Rather than introducing a new set of behaviours (say, using a new software tool or following a new process) in isolation, give employees the big picture so they can see for themselves why new behaviours are necessary. For example, if a new process is being implemented, start with a conversation about the changing needs of the business and the ways the old process is falling short. Your team will likely formulate for themselves the idea that a new process is a necessity, even before you introduce it.
  • Help them see why the old way doesn’t work anymore (and why the new state is better). And as much as possible, coach them through this thought process rather than telling them ‘how it is’. Once they have context, ask your team why they feel the current way of doing things might not be viable anymore, or which aspects are still relevant, and which aren’t. Similarly, discuss with them the rationale behind the new processes and ask for their feedback about what might work well and what might be challenging to implement (not only does this uncover their fears and resistance to the new behaviours but can help you identify the pitfalls to manage when you get to the implementation stage).
  • Personalize the benefits. Change is driven by the business needs, but in many cases, changes can lead to benefits for your team – for example, learning a new technology can be difficult but oftentimes might be more efficient or easier to use in the long run. When possible, identify and share how your team will benefit personally from changes to increase their motivation.
  • Make it their idea. This is not always a possibility (for example, if new behaviours are being driven by regulatory change or safety requirements), but whenever possible, give your team the opportunity to provide input into what new behaviours need to happen. Present them with the business problem you are trying to solve and let them generate ideas to solve it. This gives them a feeling of empowerment and lowers resistance (it’s hard to resist a behaviour you yourself have suggested is needed). Additionally, team members can bring a frontline perspective to many issues, and they may generate even better, more efficient, or effective behaviours to support the business.

Manage the Change Process

We’ve discussed the change management process in depth here and here. In addition to these tips, consider using a slow and steady approach towards implementing the new behaviours.

  • Help them shift a little at a time. Back to the new fitness regime – ever tried to do that, and change your diet, and start waking up at 5 a.m. to meditate, all in the same week? How successful were you? How sustainable where the changes over the long term? If you’re like most people, drastic and sudden change is not only unsustainable, but it can lead to discouragement and failure
  • Whenever possible, define the most important change, and focus. Once this change has been mastered and becomes habit, then move on to the next change.
  • Provide constructive feedback. Change can take time and old habits die hard. Mistakes will be made. As much as possible, keep feedback constructive and positive, and focus on successful progress rather than perfection.
  • Set a timeline and expectations. As much as possible, we need to support our teams through the process, giving them the flexibility, they need to adapt. But ultimately, your team is responsible for doing their job in a way that delivers what the business needs. Consequences for failing to change behaviour should be a last resort, and by setting clear expectations upfront, you can minimize the chance of getting to this point.

Change isn’t easy, but it’s always possible. Try these tips to support your team whenever they need to tackle the challenges of new behaviours.