Blog, culture and engagement | Ambition In Motion

by Garrett Mintz

Mon 10 May 2021

I lead an Executive Horizontal Mentorship Program and part of what I do is facilitate group sessions where all the executives come together to share their insights, questions, and thoughts on a new topic each session.

For our March group meeting, the topic was leadership and how we can improve our ability to lead at our companies. These meetings tend to start with one topic, but eventually lead to fruitful, wide-ranging conversations that might not obviously connect to our initial topic. For this meeting, we eventually started discussing psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished for making a mistake.

And then, one of the executives in our group brought up the point:

“It seems that progress and gratitude are in conflict with each other. If I am grateful, I am celebrating something that existed in the past. But if I am focused on progress, I am quickly dismissing the wins to move onto the next challenge.”

This is a fascinating point that I’ve been ruminating on for the past few weeks. There is a lot of research on the power of gratitude and its correlation with happiness. As a simple demonstration, really try to be grateful and angry at the same time and notice the contradiction between those feelings.

There is also a lot of research validating the power of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals to achieve progress.

Being grateful necessitates focusing on your past; being goal-oriented necessitates focusing on your future.

Can these mindsets work together?

This article is going to assess the merits of both practicing gratitude and goal-setting. I’ll consider their respective implications on business outcomes and analyze whether or not they are truly incompatible.

Gratitude

Gratitude is the public and private act of conscientiously and deliberately acknowledging something that has positively affected you. In a work setting, gratitude can inform your team of a job well done or show how much your team’s efforts meant to you. Gratitude gives your team purpose, a sense of pride, and a sense of belonging. It is an important signal showing the impact of their work and it shows that their work is respected and appreciated.

When frequently expressing gratitude for specific, meaningful actions is ingrained in the fabric of a culture, people tend to be happier and more likely to reach out to a coworker when something negative happens. A culture of gratitude helps build up rapport and unity across people and across teams.

People are also less likely to mistake feedback for criticism. When gratitude is an active part of the culture, it fosters emotional resilience for negative news because they know that there is no malice from the other person when receiving feedback.

The point is gratitude helps build emotional resilience. And a culture of gratitude for specific, meaningful actions helps deflate passive-aggressive mindsets or people omitting information for fear of hurt feelings. A culture of gratitude supports open, honest communication, resilient mindsets, and high-quality work.

Goal Setting

SMART goal-setting means setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound activities (SMART) for achieving your goals. This helps you identify a specific vision and create a measurable and achievable plan for something you intend to accomplish. SMART goal-setting helps teams plan for the future, improve performance, and identify specific issues and solutions for the problems they encounter.

SMART goal setting improves the efficiency and effectiveness of teams. It empowers people to envision what they would like to accomplish and helps them create a specific step-by-step plan that will accomplish that outcome.

Can gratitude and goal setting work together?

The Executive Horizontal Mentorship group that started this discussion seems to think that they are compatible, and I am inclined to agree. As mentioned previously, a culture of gratitude can boost the emotional resiliency of teammates, and this makes the identification of challenges faster and finding solutions easier.

When teams don’t have a culture of gratitude, issues start popping up all over the place: an employee trying to solve a tough problem alone; a coworker spending too much time crafting their feedback to avoid hurt feelings; a teammate happy to criticize problems without caring to offer solutions. These brief examples are only the tip of the iceberg.

The ability to identify these challenges and properly communicate them with the team helps support the work of setting SMART goals to solve the issues at hand. Open, honest, grateful communication helps your team look into the future, and SMART goals help your team leverage the present to improve the future.

Taking intentional time for gratitude on a consistent basis creates pathways and lines of communication that make problem-solving and SMART goal setting more effective. So, while the two ideas of Progress and Gratitude seemed to be in contradiction at first glance, hopefully, I’ve shown you how that is simply not the case. Instead, Progress and Gratitude build off each other to create a strong, productive, and engaged workplace.

by Garrett Mintz

Tue 30 March 2021

Our most recent group conversation focused on innovation and how we would like to become more innovative with our work. As with most meetings, I lay out the topic, but the executives can take the conversation in any direction the group chooses.

I hypothesized a few ways I thought the discussion would go. I expected it to revolve around people management. We would discuss ways to be a better leader, how to foster psychological safety with direct reports, or how to improve a specific skill and perform their role better (all of which are great topics!).

Instead, many of the group sessions went in a very different direction when discussing innovation.

In this case, the conversation revolved around priorities, balancing our values, and discussing what we find most important in our lives.

An exchange between two executives sticks with me: one executive mentioned, “If I spent time innovating in my family life like I do my work life, I would be much happier and have greater balance.”

To which another executive chimed in: “If you ask me for my priority list, I would say family comes first, then work. But, if you were to ask me the amount of time and emotional energy I put into my work compared to family life, it wouldn’t even be close to a relevant comparison”.

A third executive jumped in to reply: “But our work allows us to live the family life we want to have. But, I will admit that I struggle to enjoy my family time when the majority of my focus and energy is on work.”

This was a really interesting and unexpected direction for this conversation to go. There is a shift in work mentality from the old school bragging about how many hours one has worked in a week (the notion of asking about or even mentioning how many hours one has worked in a given week indicates this). Instead of leveraging the response of “busy” as the default response to ‘how are you?’, the mentality is trending where family life is starting to be conscientiously prioritized above work.

Based on this group discussion, we still aren’t there yet. But the fact that this stemmed from a conversation on innovation shows where we are headed: there is beginning to be a conscious push to have more balance between work and home.

The overarching question that arose from the discussion is “can we innovate in our work in a way that reduces the amount of time and emotional energy required to get the same amount of work done?” AND, instead of replacing that time with more work, can we instead divert that time and mental/emotional energy to family?

The open question here is: can this be done?

Based on the feedback from the executives in this group meeting, yes, it can be done. People become more efficient and effective in their roles all the time. Whether through new technologies or improved prioritization of time and tasks, improving the efficiency of both time and mental inputs for work can definitely be accomplished without sacrificing work quality.

The second question is: if this can be done, why do we fill that extra time with more work versus family?

There is a natural drive to keep pushing the needle forward; it manifests as a growing fear that if I am not working hard, the next person in line could be working harder and eventually take my spot.

This drive also leads to a natural tendency for executives to not fully celebrate wins, and instead simply move onto the next task. When we don’t give ourselves credit for hitting a milestone, we rob ourselves of the deserved reward that we crave for getting the job done. And the people around you notice this: “If my boss can’t take a break to reward himself for a job well done, why would I deserve a reward?” This might be motivating for some people in the short term, but eventually, that kind of ambivalence to success drains the satisfaction in a job well done.

Lastly, most executives justify more work as an effort to help their families live better lives. A perfect example of this is from the television show Breaking Bad. If you haven’t seen the show, Breaking Bad follows a high school science teacher who is recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. After realizing that he can’t afford the treatment, he decides to start cooking and selling meth to cover the cost. He justifies sacrificing his time, his emotional well-being, and even his morals into this endeavor because it is going to be “better for his family” (something he determined without their input!). Eventually, he comes to realize that he was lying to himself: it wasn’t about supporting his family; it was about his greed masquerading as providing for his family. I doubt many of your situations will end quite as dramatically, but I’m sure many will recognize some familiarity with that example.

Most executives don’t want an outcome like this! The fact that they are consciously aware that they are spending too much time and mental/emotional energy on work and not enough time on their family is the first step to creating more balance.

So the third question is: what can executives do to ensure that their newly found time and energy doesn’t simply get used with more work?

Create Standard Operating Procedures around work and life

As executives, one way we grow our impact and scale our performance is by creating SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) for our team. So why can’t we do that for ourselves when distinguishing between work and life?

Oftentimes executives choose not to commit to this type of action because it “deters flexibility when emergencies happen”. And this is a fair point. But just like creating SOPs for a work team, you can build in caveats for emergencies. AND most executives know that this excuse is pretty flimsy: if there weren’t any SOP’s in other cases, inconsistency and quality control issues would be endless.

Therefore, if we, as executives, don’t set SOP’s for when we are working versus when we are with family, then we are always working. Why? Because family time is a longer-term drive. There rarely are deadlines that occur with family time, but because work is typically filled with short-term deadlines, we prioritize those over the longer-term rewards from spending time with family.

SOP’s help take the emotion out of the decision of how best to distribute your time. An SOP is like a computer; it will do what you tell it to do – no more, no less. If you are firm with your work and life SOP, you will not have to worry about circumstantial judgment calls. It either fits into your SOP or it doesn’t.

Devote specific time to family

This is more like action 1A as it falls within the work and life SOP. Time with family is powerful. You could be doing absolutely nothing, but the fact that you are there with family is what counts. This sounds like an obvious point, but if it were so obvious, this article wouldn’t be relevant. It is easy to quantify work output and less easy to quantify family time output. You don’t earn “points” for attending your daughter’s soccer match or your son’s recital. You do it because it makes you happy. Even if you don’t have any plans on the docket for your family time, that isn’t an excuse for getting back into work during the time that you have already decided is for family.

Devote specific mental and emotional energy to family

This is more like action 1B as it falls within the work and life SOP. Simply spending time with family is not enough for that time to be meaningful. Our executives clearly distinguished between both time and mental and emotional energy. If you are physically “with” your family, but you are mentally and emotionally “checked out”, can you really consider that time valuable?

Family time deserves as much mental and emotional intention as we are willing to put into our work. And it probably deserves more!

If executives can begin to implement these actions into their lives, they will become substantially happier and aligned between their work and family time value system – at least according to our executives in our group meeting.

by Garrett Mintz

Sun 21 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment helps you understand your professional performance by having both you and your colleagues assess your abilities across several key skills.

The goal of a 360-degree assessment is to identify blind spots and vulnerabilities in your professional skillset. By getting feedback from your colleagues and comparing their perspectives to your self-assessment, you can get a deeper understanding of your work performance.

There are generally 3 outcomes from a 360-degree assessment: 1) somebody has underestimated their abilities, 2) somebody has overestimated their abilities, or 3) somebody is self-aware about their abilities.

This article is going to address some possible problems and solutions that might arise for people who have overestimated their abilities. This article is part of a series I’m writing about Ambition In Motion’s 360-Degree Assessments and how their results should be interpreted. There are ten other articles addressing the two other possible outcomes of a 360-Degree Assessment available here:

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Self-Aware- People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

When somebody has overestimated their abilities, they are essentially giving themselves a greater score for whatever category is being measured compared to their colleagues’ scores of them.

At first glance, this can sting because you are essentially learning that your perception of yourself is greater than your colleagues' perception of you which may cause one to think “I must not be as good as I think I am” or “My colleagues must not realize all of the things I do to be strong in this area.”

For most people, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

When my team and I at Ambition In Motion facilitate mentorship programs, we also include a 360-Degree Assessment and report to each participant. We do this for two reasons: 1) these reports can help reveal opportunities for growth in one’s professional skill set, and 2) deep self-reflection is a major launching pad for fostering vulnerability in a mentor relationship. These two components are crucial to developing strong, valuable mentor relationships.

The 5 core areas we measure in our 360-Degree Assessment are: People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management.

Next, I’ll explain the significance of each of these categories, and then suggest ways that someone can learn after finding out they are overestimating their abilities in each category. This should be an opportunity for growth and understanding, not a time to be defensive and stubborn.

People Management

People management abilities are extremely valuable, regardless of whether or not you are in a leadership position or have the title of manager. People management stretches across one’s ability to maintain positive relationships with those they work with, participate in organizational citizenship activities (e.g., supporting a colleague with their work), be open to constructive feedback, and show that you are always open to learning more.

If you gave yourself a greater score than colleagues on your people management abilities, there is clearly a gap. This could mean that either you are not as skilled as you believe, or that the people you work with don’t realize the effort you put into being a good people manager. The first step to reducing that gap is purposefully reflecting and trying to understand what is causing the gap.

Not as good as you believe you are

This can be a tough pill to swallow. You may not be as good of a people manager as you thought you were. If you gave yourself a moderate score and your colleagues gave you a lower score, this typically is a product of stagnation: sitting still means falling behind in the long run. You might not think highly of your people management ability, but in your perception, you do enough to get the work done but you aren’t that bad.

You gave yourself a moderate score

This is a fork in the road. One option is to accept being a bad/mediocre people manager, which means operating under the assumption that this skill is not crucial for your own career trajectory or happiness. This is a risky move! Humans are naturally social, whether we realize it or not, and poor people management abilities will have unforeseen costs. But if that’s how you decide, perhaps you can skip the rest of this segment.

On the other hand, if you want to grow your People Management abilities, then keep reading.

Being a strong people manager is all about being willing to help others and contribute positively to the workplace culture; we call this “Organizational Citizenship”. I like to refer to being a strong people manager as the Tim Duncan award. Tim Duncan is a retired professional basketball player who played for the San Antonio Spurs and won 5 NBA championships with them. Tim was consistently the best player on the floor, but he had a secret weapon. Tim’s playstyle was special because he deferred to his team and played to their strengths to amplify his team’s ability to win. Tim consistently ceded the spotlight to his teammates, even though he was the best player on his team for most of those championships. By helping build up those around him, even if it didn’t get him the stats, recognition, or pay that other superstars demand, he helped push his team towards victory.

Now, I don’t know Tim Duncan personally. But, I would imagine that his professional basketball career was very satisfying: 5 NBA Championship Rings speaks for itself. He also avoided drama with his contract or playtime or coach, and his teammates took notice. When the best player on the team cares so deeply about building up his teammates and avoiding the BS, the rest of the team follows his lead because they are invested in reaching their team’s potential.

If you are reading this, you are probably not a professional basketball player – most work environments don’t have a pinnacle moment that they work up to every year similar to a national championship. But, you do have a long “regular season”, even if your “championship” is only your annual review at the end of the year. And dominating your personal regular season can sometimes mean pulling your team together to avoid the drama and put in the hard work, game after game.

Everyone wants to work in an environment in which they feel happy, respected, and clear about what and why they do their work. You probably also want a work environment with other people that also feel happy, respected, and clear about what and why they do their work. Regardless of whether you have people management in your job description, working on improving your people management abilities will help keep you and your team thrive and become happier at work.

You gave yourself a high score

The other side of this people management coin is that you gave yourself a high score and your colleagues gave you a moderate or a low score.

This is typically a sign of a person who is well informed on what it means to be a strong people manager – e.g. you have read the books, maybe you have motivational quotes on your wall or posted on social media, maybe you’ve even written out what it means to be a good people manager.

You, theoretically, understand what it means to be a strong people manager, but in real life have not been able to effectively apply what you have learned.

Just to be abundantly clear, this is on YOU. Sure, you can find some mitigating factors or excuses, but in the end, good People Management will mean adapting to your environment. It’s not your team’s fault that your methods for being a strong people manager haven’t been impactful to them. It is up to you to listen to feedback, reflect on it, and then try something different to be better. And if you have tried multiple times to be a better people manager and it still isn’t working, it means you haven’t tried enough things. It took Thomas Edison 1,000 attempts to invent the light bulb. If you have studied people management tactics AND you have tried 1,000 different ways to be a better people manager but still are having trouble, you are probably just extremely unlucky. But just like in so many other parts of life, take some comfort in knowing that all you need to do is keep learning and trying new things.

Keep in mind that people management is an ever-evolving process. In the 1980s, Jack Welch of General Electric slashed the bottom 10% of earners every year at the company, and at the time people lauded him for it. Now, GE’s stock is all over the place and a cutthroat culture ensued because nobody felt safe. The point is that what is considered a strong people management strategy now may not be considered a strong people management strategy in the future. Keep an open mind for the innovation in People Management.

Strategies to improve your people management

To begin, always ask for feedback. Performance reviews shouldn’t be some annual tradition; gathering feedback is the crucial final step when somebody has tried something new at work and they need to know if it was effective. And reviews shouldn’t just be between the manager and direct report. Anyone who is affected by your work should have their feedback incorporated when you seek to make improvements.

Being a strong people manager is about your ability to help others do their best work. Put another way, how can you be the best Robin to their Batman? If you can think of yourself as the sidekick to help those you work with be the hero in their own story, you will make incredible strides at being a better people manager.

Therefore, the first step is understanding where those you are working with would like to go. Have you ever helped someone and then felt that they weren’t grateful for your help? Oftentimes it is because what you thought would be helpful to them wasn’t what they needed. You assumed that going out of your way to perform some task would be what they were looking for, but you skipped past communicating and stepped on their toes. This might be because they wanted to experience doing the task themselves and your help seemed more like you didn’t trust them. Or, it could be because your assumption about what they want is incorrect, so by jumping in and taking over, you were really just forcing your personal style onto their own decisions.

So, the best thing for being a better people manager is asking those you are working with what their biggest challenges are and finding the clarifying details that will help you truly understand the issue. Without that information, you can’t start the next step: working collaboratively to find new ideas to support them and ensuring achieving these new outcomes will work for the people involved.

Notice how I didn’t write “performing these new tasks” but instead wrote “achieving these new outcomes”. This is critical to distinguish because you completing random tasks is not enough to be considered a strong people manager. You have to help the people achieve the outcomes that you all have agreed are important. If I lose my dog and you say that you will help me find my dog, I will be grateful if you help search but my pain is not alleviated until my dog is found.

Thus, commit to clear, achievable outcomes that directly support your colleagues and ensure that achieving those specific outcomes will be, in fact, helpful.

Once you achieve that outcome, ask for feedback on how that outcome helped them with their work and how it made them more efficient or effective at work.

This may seem like a lot, but this is the type of work that is necessary to be a truly impactful and strong people manager.

In essence, overestimating your abilities in these categories does not mean that you will forever be this way, but it does mean that there are opportunities for growth that you must tap into if you would like to improve.

by Garrett Mintz

Sat 20 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment helps you understand your professional performance by having both you and your colleagues assess your abilities across several key skills.

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Self-Aware- People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

When somebody has overestimated their abilities, they are essentially giving themselves a greater score for whatever category is being measured compared to their colleagues’ scores of them.

For most people, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The 5 core areas we measure in our 360-Degree Assessment are: People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management.

Innovation

Innovation is a critical skill to possess in any working environment, even (and probably especially) if your role requires you to follow strict protocols and procedures. Innovation stretches across one’s willingness to pursue new activities or actions that can drive different results, ability to incorporate others in the innovation process, and propensity to challenge conventional thinking.

If you have overestimated your innovation score, that means that either you gave yourself a moderate innovation score and your colleagues gave you a low score or you gave yourself a high score and your colleagues gave a low to moderate score.

You gave yourself a moderate score

You may think that your work doesn’t require you to be all that innovative. You gave yourself a moderate score because perhaps you think you do your work adequately and that you try about as many new things as anyone else at work does.

What you might not have realized was that your colleagues don’t view you as someone willing to try new things or take an innovative approach to your work.

They may perceive you as somebody who is comfortable and either unwilling or disinterested in pushing the envelope because of that comfort. However, comfort is the enemy of innovation. All things considered, it’s pretty tough to maintain that comfort and also focus on making important changes at the same time. Innovation requires being willing to try something new at the expense of comfort now.

As humans, we constantly seek comfort and our ability to innovate allows us to be more comfortable.

But comfort also leads to boredom, stagnation, and eventual decline.

By conveying to your colleagues that you aren’t innovative, you are communicating that you aren’t willing to try something new today so you can be more comfortable in the future. In this case, that future comfort could mean that your team has finally mastered a new tool that takes care of their most tedious tasks, or it could mean that a bold company culture initiative finally begins showing its positive effects after a rocky start.

Instead, you are communicating that you are going to ride out this comfort wave until you retire, or until you become uncomfortable (e.g. you get fired, your company declines in business, or you quit because of boredom).

The issue with communicating this to others is that you are inadvertently contributing to a stale, uninspired culture. If you are riding out this comfort wave, others may think “I am going to ride out this comfort wave too.” And once everyone at your company is too comfortable, eventually, another company that is willing to innovate is going to come along and run you out of business (e.g. Blockbuster) forcing you to be uncomfortable and have to start innovating again.

Essentially, I am writing that by neglecting your ability to innovate, you are being a freeloader on your company’s culture. You also aren’t exercising your “innovation muscles”, which leaves you less equipped to handle an uncomfortable situation when it presents itself.

This even makes sense from a pure self-preservation perspective, even if you don’t care about making work more interesting or being better at your job. You should want to be more innovative at work because it encourages others to follow suit (and not be freeloaders themselves). This allows you to preserve the level of comfort you have with your job (because ideally, every person is pursuing some semblance of innovation at work), and also allows you to flex your “innovation muscles” and be prepared for the inevitable uncomfortable situations that will arise. It is really difficult to predict getting fired or facing a business decline (otherwise you might “pull a hammy” and go unemployed for over a year because your work and skill set has become obsolete).

You gave yourself a high score

If you gave yourself a high score for your innovation, but your colleagues gave you a low or moderate score, this almost always stems from a lack of effective communication.

People who are innovative tend to innovate on their own. Sometimes this is because a lack of trust (e.g. I don’t want others to find out what I am working on or I don’t trust that others will work as hard as me so I don’t share with them) or a lack of confidence with failure (e.g. if I tell people and it fails, people will think negatively of me).

If it is a lack of trust, why is that? Sometimes it requires some soul-searching and reflecting on some scars to get down to the root of this lack of trust. You could have been burned in the past by people that you relied on that didn’t come through for you. Or you could have had ideas stolen and others taking credit for your plans.

Once you have identified the reason for this lack of trust, ask yourself, have the people you are working with currently done anything to cause you to not trust them?

If the answer is no, then it is critical to separate those past scars from the current opportunity of people you get to work with.

The reason this is so critical is that people like being included in innovative processes. Your current circumstances are different from the past, and you need to be fair to the people around you. People like being included in the innovation process because innovating is like a super-fertilizer for fostering a feeling of purpose at work. There is this notion called the “IKEA Affect” in which people feel much more connected to the furniture that they build (like most of the furniture from IKEA) than the furniture that comes pre-made. When people feel part of an innovation process, they are much more likely to support the idea’s success and find greater satisfaction within their own work because they have found a new application of their skills and perspective. Finally, this also lets others know that you are somebody they can approach when they have an innovative idea or want to try something new.

The other big reason people overestimate their innovation score and score themselves highly is because of a lack of confidence with failure. This stems from the goal of perfectionism. Studies have been done on high school Valedictorians and their likelihood of achieving similar high marks in their careers. The unfortunate results are that Valedictorians rarely achieve similar high marks and accomplishments in their careers. The researchers theorize that the reason for this is the drive for perfection. Because these Valedictorians were instilled to be perfect from such a young age, it may stunt their ability to try new things because they don’t want to risk that “4.0 GPA”.

Failure is a part of growth and innovation. There is never a perfect time to innovate, and there is never a perfect solution for our issues. However, the more things we try and sometimes fail at doing and sharing with others, the closer we will be to achieving a solution that improves on our current situation. As Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn says, “If you aren’t embarrassed by what you put out 3 months after launching it, you released too late.”

To be more innovative, the key is being willing to try new things to make your work more efficient and effective. Innovation is the process of taking temporary discomfort now to be more comfortable later. Incorporating others is critical to being more innovative. Alone, your ideas will only reach a fraction of your potential. But, your ideas with the feedback of others can make a monumental impact.

However, one final concern is with gathering feedback. There is a critical mass to feedback, especially if you are soliciting feedback from a group. The more people you have in a conversation, the worse your feedback will be. This is caused by a combination of groupthink and the conscious and subconscious concerns people have about sharing in front of a group. To make this point, in a traditional classroom, roughly 10% of students will consistently raise their hands to ask or answer questions. Is this because only 10% of students have questions or know the answer? No. It is because others aren’t comfortable with bringing up questions or drawing attention to themselves in front of an audience. Or the cost of drawing this attention doesn’t outweigh the reward of finding out the answer. Therefore, get feedback from many people, but in smaller groups or individually.

by Garrett Mintz

Fri 19 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment helps you understand your professional performance by having both you and your colleagues assess your abilities across several key skills.

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Self-Aware- People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

When somebody has overestimated their abilities, they are essentially giving themselves a greater score for whatever category is being measured compared to their colleagues’ scores of them.

For most people, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The 5 core areas we measure in our 360-Degree Assessment are: People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management.

Leadership Ability

Leadership ability is an important skill for any professional, regardless of whether you hold an official leadership position. Leadership ability is based on one’s ability to set proper expectations for their work and communicate those expectations clearly and effectively. Skilled leaders demonstrate their ability to motivate others towards a purpose that benefits everyone, their willingness to take accountability when things go wrong, and the modesty to give credit when things go right.

If you overestimated your leadership abilities, it means that you gave yourself a moderate score while your colleagues rated you low or you gave yourself a high score and your colleagues rated you moderate to low.

You rated yourself moderately

You may think that if you aren’t in a leadership role that you don’t need to focus on your leadership ability. However, leadership ability goes beyond your title.

You may have thought that if you perform as expected that you could justify giving yourself a moderate leadership ability score. However, if your colleagues rated you low, they clearly disagree, and this is an important opportunity for growth.

Leadership ability is all about transparency, accountability, and the ability to give credit to others.

The reason why possessing a leadership title is not necessary to possess strong leadership abilities is because great leadership is about being a great colleague to work with.

Have you ever worked with somebody whose work you relied on, but you were unclear on what they would deliver, when they would deliver it, or how they would deliver it? What about somebody that’s full to the brim with excuses? Anytime anything goes wrong, they immediately blame others or come up with excuses for why it didn’t work out. Or have you ever worked with somebody that consistently takes all of the credit and doesn’t mention you or anyone else on your team who worked hard? You don’t want to be that person! Just because others do it, doesn’t mean you should too.

Think about how most people act in their first 2 weeks at a new job. They are probably excited to throw themselves at the work in front of them, and they are open to taking accountability when things go wrong because they have the fair excuse of being new. They will likely set (potentially over-optimistic) expectations about their work with everyone and because they don’t want to let anyone down, make a strong effort to meet those expectations. They also will be focused on giving credit to those they work with when things go well because they want to make positive first impressions. What they lack in experience at the workplace is made up for in earnest commitment to doing good work with their coworkers.

Being a strong leader is being like that…just all the time and not just in the first two weeks at a new job. People like that are much more enjoyable to work with, give others less anxiety, and have confidence because they have earned the credibility and respect of those they work with.

You rated yourself highly

If you rated yourself highly in your leadership abilities and your colleagues rated you moderately or low, you are probably not as strong of a leader as you think you are.

People in this situation typically have read leadership books, have gone to seminars, and have seen motivational speakers. They, theoretically, know all of the keys to be a strong leader, but when it comes to the application of those theories, their efforts simply aren’t ringing true with those they work with. And when it comes down to it, that’s the only part that matters.

Because they have the knowledge of what it means to be a strong leader, they tend to rate themselves highly. But, when there is a gap and their colleagues disagree with their self-assessment, it is natural to feel defensive about this disparity.

The question one needs to ask themselves if they are faced with this situation is “why is there this gap?”. Or put another way “what am I doing that I feel is exuding strong leadership traits?” and then “How could my colleagues not perceive those actions in the way I am perceiving them?”.

In some cases, people feel like they are showing strong leadership abilities, but their colleagues perceive those efforts as the standard tasks that anyone would do. If this is the case then a discussion around expectations needs to be had between the professional and their colleagues. If you feel like you are going out of your way to being a strong leader, but others perceive those efforts as standard operating procedures, you probably need to update your expectations. Instead of treating those actions as “above and beyond” (because maybe they were “above and beyond” at a previous employer), try to trust your colleagues and trust their assessment. That means finding new ways to demonstrate your leadership abilities that make a difference in the work being done by your colleagues.

In other cases, people feel like they are showcasing leadership abilities with their actions, but nobody is noticing. This is a difficult argument to make because leadership is an inherently public task. Essentially, when something goes wrong and you take accountability, you should be taking accountability publicly and fairly with others to view and observe. If you are taking accountability “quietly”, you aren’t really taking accountability because the nature of accountability is ownership over the responsibility so others know who they are counting on, for better or for worse. If you are giving credit “behind the scenes”, you are giving credit, but not in a way that fully exemplifies your leadership ability. Your willingness to praise publicly and fairly means that you are willing to put your reputation on the line in front of an audience to give credit to someone else. If you are setting your expectations on a case-by-case basis for the exact same work from different people, you are opening yourself to favoritism (intentional or not) and building a reputation for inconsistency. Your willingness to set consistent, public, and fair expectations both for your own work and from others’ work demonstrates that you hold yourself and others to the same standards.

Therefore, leadership ability should be a very noticeable activity, and if people aren’t noticing, then you aren’t leading. If that’s the case, you need to work to make sure that people notice without you incidentally seeming pompous or outlandish in your actions. This will take some work, and you may have some missteps, but the key is to keep trying to improve each day.

To improve your leadership ability, focus on immediately taking accountability when things go wrong (even if it isn’t directly your fault). If you had anything to do with something not going right, you can take accountability for it publicly.

Focus on setting clear expectations for others for what you expect from their work and what they should expect from yours. You can set clear timelines for when others should expect your work to be finished and provide useful details so they can know what to expect. This will help build trust and ensure that your colleagues know what to expect from you, which then can mean that you know what to expect from their work as well.

Set aside time to think about who has been working hard and accomplishing difficult tasks (even if they aren’t publicly recognized) and give credit, publicly, to those people for working so hard. For example, oftentimes in sales, we give a lot of credit to those making the sale, but those people in supply chain, operations, or account management don’t get the credit they deserve for implementing the delivery of the product.

by Garrett Mintz

Thu 18 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment helps you understand your professional performance by having both you and your colleagues assess your abilities across several key skills.

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Self-Aware- People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

When somebody has overestimated their abilities, they are essentially giving themselves a greater score for whatever category is being measured compared to their colleagues’ scores of them.

For most people, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The 5 core areas we measure in our 360-Degree Assessment are: People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management.

Communication Skills

The ability to communicate effectively affects every interaction you have personally and professionally. When you make improvements to your communication skills, you are likely going to improve your skills in every other category measured by our 360-Degree Assessment. Communication is based on one’s ability to listen, trust that others are speaking openly and honestly with them, and understand what others are sharing before focusing on being understood.

If you overestimated your communication skills that means either you gave yourself a moderate score and your colleagues gave you a low score or you gave yourself a high score and your colleagues gave you a moderate or low score.

You rated yourself moderately

There are many reasons you may have rated yourself moderately in your communication skills. It could be that you don’t believe you need strong communication skills to perform your role effectively, or it could be that you’re aware of your weakness here but haven’t found the time to focus on improving it.

If you are of the mindset that your role doesn’t require you to have strong communication skills, you might be right, at least based on your limited view of what your role is. If you are a solo contributor, you may think “I only need to get my work done and that’s it.” These common refrains don’t tell you the whole story though.

The issue with this mode of thinking is that it forces you to walk the tightrope of patience. When you are an individual contributor and you don’t feel like you need strong communication skills, you willingly turn yourself into a commodity; if your company can find somebody to do your work better for cheaper, the economic decision would be to fire you and hire them. The reason is that you aren’t bringing anything else to the table in terms of your contributions to the culture of the company because you have decided that you don’t need strong communication skills so subsequently your interactions with others at your company are likely to be minimal at best and a net negative at worst. Any mistake in your work becomes magnified because you have decided to not invest in your communication skills. Consider which sounds better for management: “Jon made that mistake, but he is a great guy and he pulls the team together” versus “Jon made a mistake and now I feel like he isn’t listening to me or communicating effectively with the team.” Everyone makes mistakes so which Jon would you want at your company?

Maybe you feel like you just don’t have the time to work on your communication skills. So, you gave yourself a moderate score because you “think” you are communicating fairly effectively at least. Well, let this report be the smoke signal informing you that, as the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You are NOT communicating effectively and what you “think” is just getting by is not making the cut.

If that’s surprising or frustrating to read, try putting the shoe on the other foot.

Have you ever given instructions to somebody or been discussing some important work topic and they responded as if they weren’t listening to a word of what you said? Or they seem like they were listening but still end up acting in a way completely contradictory to what you said? Think about that frustration for a moment.

You know how frustrating it can be to feel ignored. If your team is giving you a low communication skills score, YOU are that person, or at least you are that person often enough for them to notice.

Have you ever felt like you had to sugarcoat the truth when talking with somebody? First off, that is usually a frustrating conversation. But even worse, it’s a recipe for eventual disaster, especially if they need to know the real truth of what you are trying to tell them. Based on your team’s feedback, you are the person they feel they need to sugar-coat the truth for. Your communication skills with your team keep them from feeling comfortable being open and honest with you. Instead, they don’t trust your reactions and worry that you might react poorly to bad news, but that isn’t going to make the bad news go away. When your team does not feel comfortable telling you the full truth, you may as well be flying blind.

When your team gives you a low communication skills score, they are telling you that you are an energy taker instead of an energy giver. People must exert significantly more energy communicating with you because they have to work double-time trying to find how to get their point across effectively. Instead of just getting to the point, they might need to repeat themselves. Or, since they feel that they can’t be fully honest with you, they are forced to plan out what to say so you can handle it. That type of working relationship is untenable. Poor communication skills are bad for business, bad for your team’s patience, and bad for your career stability.

You rated yourself highly

If you rate your communication skills highly and your team gave you a moderate or low score, that likely means that you are consciously trying to improve your communication skills, but it isn’t translating into reality.

People who rate their communication skills highly and then receive a lower score tend to be pretty surprised when they get their results. They may have done their “homework” and are familiar with many communication books or concepts and think they have tried ways to be better communicators. If you fall into this category, you probably are a little confused by these results.

Essentially, what this means is that the efforts you have taken to be a better communicator have not rung true for those you work with.

For your ability to listen to others, do you ever hear what somebody says and then respond with a story or comment on something unrelated? We all do this from time to time. Maybe you felt that their point was likely over and you really needed to get that other story or comment out (what if you forgot it or the moment passed?!). What you may be neglecting is what your response is communicating to the other person. You didn’t realize that, although you heard what they said, they were expecting a relevant response to close out their comment; your completely irrelevant response about something completely irrelevant to that point makes them feel that what they said wasn’t heard. And when people pick up those signals, consciously or not, they begin to feel frustrated. By the way, I – Garrett Mintz the writer of this article – am VERY guilty of this and I try to work on improving this every day.

The other side of communications skills is fostering an environment where others feel comfortable communicating openly and honestly with you. Have you ever seen this type of thing happen with other people? If you are a fan of the television show, Game of Thrones, this type of poor listening reminds me of how people listen to Petyr Baelish, or Littlefinger, when he is talking with them. If you haven’t seen Game of Thrones, Littlefinger is a sly, fast-talking businessman who is constantly playing people off of each other. When he speaks with anyone, he always tells them what they want to hear and everyone thinks he is on their side…that is until he backstabs them and leaves them out to dry. I am not saying that the people you work with are Petyr Baelish, but I am saying that they feel like they can’t give you the whole truth, and eventually, that will rear its ugly head (e.g. turnover, upset clients/employees, missed deadlines, unmet expectations).

There are a few things you can do to improve your communication skills. First, from a listening skills perspective, you can focus on your body language. Your body communicates substantially more than what your words do, even if neither person consciously realizes it. If you feel like you are listening but others don’t think you are, your body is likely telling them another story with mixed signals. To improve your body language you can focus on standing (or sitting) up straight when speaking with others, making 80% eye contact, nodding when they make points, and taking notes (if relevant and appropriate). From a verbal perspective, you must practice actively listening when you are waiting until they are done talking before sharing your response (and don’t interrupt them either!). When you do respond, you can reiterate their perspective to confirm that you understand what they just said. E.g. “If I am hearing you correctly…”

Second, from an openness and honesty perspective, focus on asking for feedback. When people provide unsolicited feedback to others, the brainwaves that are activated by the person receiving the unsolicited feedback are similar to the brainwaves when listening to white noise/nonsense. However, when we frequently ask for specific feedback, we are inviting others to give honest feedback and you are mentally preparing yourself to actually reflect on it. They are much more likely to be conscientious when giving this feedback and compared to unsolicited feedback, it’s much more likely to be a productive critique rather than some trite complaint.

The other thing you can do to encourage openness and honesty with your colleagues is to practice vulnerability exercises with them. In a 1-on-1 environment, ask them if they would be willing to be vulnerable with you, and you in turn be vulnerable with them. Think of the things that concern you with work and try to share these with them; they may share these exact same concerns! The benefit of doing this is that it sets the standard that it’s okay to deliver you potentially negative news on important topics because it was on your mind anyways. People tend to not give people the full truth for fear of upsetting them. By showing others that you are just as concerned, it makes it okay for them to deliver you the full truth of what is going on.

by Garrett Mintz

Wed 17 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment helps you understand your professional performance by having both you and your colleagues assess your abilities across several key skills.

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Self-Aware- People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

When somebody has overestimated their abilities, they are essentially giving themselves a greater score for whatever category is being measured compared to their colleagues’ scores of them.

For most people, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The 5 core areas we measure in our 360-Degree Assessment are: People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management.

Financial Management

Financial management is a skill that is often overlooked but can have a large impact on the company. Financial management is based on one’s ability to manage the resources they oversee (including their time and the way they are spending their time at work), a company budget, and others’ perception of a person being fiscally responsible.

If you have overestimated your financial management abilities, you have either given yourself a moderate score and your colleagues rated you low or you gave yourself and high score and your colleagues rated you moderately or low.

You rated yourself moderately

If you rated yourself moderately in terms of your financial management, there are a few possible explanations. Perhaps you aren’t in charge of a budget, or maybe you don’t think that managing finances is that critical to your role.

If your colleagues rated you low for financial management then that is a sign that there is an opportunity for growth for your abilities.

This is also typically a sign that others believe you could be more effective or efficient with your work. Even if you aren’t in charge of a formal budget, you are responsible for your time and how effective you are with the time you spend at work.

By giving yourself a moderate score, you might think that you are doing enough to get by and do the “normal” amount of work compared to your colleagues. But if your colleagues rated you low, they clearly do not see it that way.

Your colleagues' low score indicates that you are either spending either company dollars or company time on things that aren’t helpful to the business. We aren’t robots; everyone does this to some degree, but once your colleagues start to notice, that’s a strong sign that you need to do better.

Dr. Robert Cialdini has a concept called “what is focal is causal” meaning that what people see is what they perceive and internalize as important or significant. If people are giving you a low score on your financial management ability, they perceive you as lazy, or looking for ways to get out of work, or as someone who spends money recklessly; no matter which way they perceive it, they end up realizing that you shouldn’t be trusted with a budget.

Before getting your results on a 360-Degree Assessment, you may think others aren’t noticing, or that others in the company are way more wasteful than you. However, clearly in the perception of your colleagues, that is not the case and you have been put on notice.

You rated yourself highly

If you rated yourself high on your financial management abilities but your colleagues gave you a low or moderate score, it indicates that you aren’t as strong of a financial manager (in the perspective of your team) as you think you are.

This typically stems from a lack of communication. If you manage a budget and your team sees you spending money on things that seem lavish and unnecessary (from their perspective), this can cause them to feel like you aren’t managing your company’s finances appropriately. This feeling is magnified if they feel underpaid while seeing this. If you don’t manage a budget and your team gave you a low or moderate financial management score, it means that they don’t believe that you spend your time at work effectively or that you are overpaid for your work. If salaries aren’t public information, people make assumptions for income based on your lifestyle, and if your lifestyle appears to be better than others, especially if they see you doing the same or less work than them, they will notice.

If people at your work are staying late and getting in early, and meanwhile they see you working the base 9 to 5, then that may cause them to become frustrated. They might think that either you are lazy, or that you are expecting more from them than is fair. What they may not realize is that your work responsibilities might be deeply analytical and have a compounding impact on the business, or they might not see the parts of your job that take place outside the office. For example, some work directly correlates time with output – essentially the company can get a certain number of tasks done by an employee for every hour they are at work; this is called linear productivity. On the other hand, there is work that, with intentional deep thinking, has an exponential impact on output in shorter bursts, but with increasingly marginal returns over a long period of time; this is called exponential productivity. Not every job has the same types of tasks and productivity needs; but without your open communication with your team, you can end up looking like a slacker.

The point is that until the truth is communicated to those you work with, they will form assumptions to fill in the gaps as to why things are happening the way that they are. Unfortunately, many of these assumptions are negative.

The best thing you can do to improve your financial management abilities, both for you and for how your team perceives you, is to communicate and learn. New innovations are constantly happening to make our work more efficient and effective. If we are open to learning about these tools and resources, we can ensure we are up to date on what needs to be done to be most effective at work – both for managing a budget and managing our time at work. Communicating effectively to those we work with allows them to know how we are spending our budget and our time. The more we can loop our team in on budget decisions and decisions about how to best spend our time, the more aware they will be as to what we are doing and how that is impacting the business. The best-run companies did not end up that way by accident; they intentionally fostered a company culture of honesty, hard work, and accountability from the top down and that pays dividends when everyone is brought into the fold.

by Garrett Mintz

Mon 1 February 2021

A 360-degree assessment is a unique survey that uses input from self-assessment and from colleagues’ assessments to understand a professional’s strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. By gathering feedback from your colleagues alongside your own perspective on those same questions, we can get a deeper look at how your self-perception compares to the way your colleagues see you.

With this data, we can break down the results of a 360-Degree Assessment into three outcomes:

1) Somebody has underestimated their abilities (self-rating lower than colleagues’ ratings),

2) Somebody has overestimated their abilities (self-rating higher than colleagues’),
or
3) Somebody is self-aware about their abilities (self-rating matches colleagues’).

This article is going to address some possible problems and solutions that might arise for people who are self-aware of their abilities. This article is part of a series I’m writing about Ambition In Motion’s 360-Degree Assessments and how their results should be interpreted. There are ten other articles addressing the two other possible outcomes of a 360-Degree Assessment available here:

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Overestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Understanding Self-Awareness for 360-Degree Assessments

When somebody is self-aware about their abilities, this means that they gave themselves a similar score as the score their colleagues provided on the same skill.

Initially, self-awareness may seem to be a cut-and-dry positive outcome but looking a bit deeper reveals some potential issues. After all, the goal of a 360-degree assessment is to identify blind spots and close the gaps between one’s self-perception and the perception of their colleagues. However, we find that there are opportunities for growth within a self-aware 360-degree assessment report and this article will review those opportunities.

At Ambition In Motion, our 360-Degree Assessment has 5 core components:

a. People Management,

b. Innovation,

c. Leadership Ability,

d. Communication Skills, and

e. Financial Management.

While self-awareness is likely the best outcome relative to the other two possibilities, I’m next going to explain how you can leverage self-awareness to grow as a professional and identify blind spots in your professional perspective. I’m going to show why self-awareness on your 360-Degree Assessment is more than just a pat on the back, even if you and your colleagues share similar views on your performance.

Financial Management

If your colleagues' assessment of your financial management abilities is aligned with your own, that can be a very good thing or an opportunity for growth – depending on whether or not the score was high or low.

Self-Awareness but poor performance

If you rated yourself low in your ability to manage finances and your colleagues agree with you, this can be a major opportunity for growth.

Before diving into the implications behind why this is an opportunity for growth, it is probably wise to assess, internally, the reasons for your low self-rating and why your colleagues would also rate you low.

In terms of yourself, why would you rate yourself low on your ability to manage your finances? Are you taking (or have taken) actions that are financially detrimental to the company? If so, did you learn and alter your actions from the circumstance? Or do you think that you simply could be doing more or doing better overall?

One of the largest expenses for a company is human capital. Some managers will rate themselves low in financial management because they are unwilling to have difficult conversations with colleagues about productivity, and those colleagues don’t realize the implications that their actions may have on the financial viability of the company.

This is the type of outcome many tech startups find themselves in. Essentially, they will raise money with the anticipation that by the time the money runs out, they will have garnered enough traction to justify a follow-on round of investment or have enough revenue to cover expenses. The area that most startup founders struggle with is managing the finances. More often than not, they believe they have a strong idea that requires strong employees (with high salaries) to implement the idea. The ultimate balance is between quality talent (and the funds used to pay them) compared to what they produce and the relative difference in outcomes between a top-paid team and a lower-paid group of professionals. Analyzing which aspects of the business require top caliber salaries is crucial because the drop off between the top-caliber and a solid hire but with less pay can be extensive in terms of the effect on the company’s bottom line.

If you don’t manage a team, you might think to yourself “I don’t manage a budget therefore my ability to manage finances doesn’t really matter.”

I am going to make the argument that this notion is not correct at all.

If you are paid a salary (or hourly) for the time you put in at work, you manage finances – that being the time you spend working and how effective you are in the time you do spend at work. In some cases there are egregious misuses of time like taking actions detrimental to the business like working on non-work tasks while on the clock, spreading rumors or negative gossip about other employees, and clocking in late or early.

There is also the contemplation of whether you are optimally using your work time. For example, if you know your brain is optimally effective in the morning, you should be considering that with your daily schedule. If you choose to pursue social tasks or tasks that don’t require deep thinking in the morning, you could be squandering your brain’s daily threshold of deep mental focus. If you have open office hours or are expected to have your emails checked and responded to within an hour, you are diminishing your ability to complete any task that requires focus because you are constantly having to check your email.

Think of your salary as a budget your company allocates to you to be optimally effective at work. Are there components to this budget that are misused or could time be reallocated in a way that is leveraged more effectively? That is a question you will have to answer for yourself, but once you get to a point where you feel like you are optimally leveraging your time at work, you can start to see improvements in your ability to manage the most important budget your company entrusts you with, your salary/time.

The biggest counterpoint I hear about why not be optimally effective with your work time is “everyone else clocks out early or takes breaks more frequently than advised. There doesn’t seem to be a financial incentive to perform any more optimally, so why should I work on optimizing this?”

The answer is that how others work should not affect how you work. Back to the analogy of considering your salary like a budget your company entrusts you with. If somebody mismanages their budget, does that justify that you should mismanage your own?

Of course not! But this is a trap that people fall into all the time.

If you gave yourself a low score for your financial management abilities and your colleagues agree with you, that is a sign that you can improve yourself.

The best way to improve your abilities in this area is to research methods for best managing your time and creating a schedule for yourself that allows you to get the optimum amount of work done in a day given your unique set of responsibilities. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution as everyone has different work tasks. If your role requires you to frequently check emails, perhaps creating a space in time once or twice a day set aside for checking your emails. You could even create a “vacation” response informing senders when you will be checking your emails next so they can anticipate a response. Of course, this would need to account for specific time-sensitive requests if necessary.

If you are willing to take action to start improving your efficiency at work (and encouraging your team as well, if necessary) you can start to measure whether what you tried worked or didn’t work. The best way to achieve improvement is to try things you haven’t tried before.

Self-Awareness and high performance

If you rated yourself relatively high on your financial management abilities and your colleagues agreed with you, that is excellent. That is a positive sign that you are properly managing the time you are paid for both in terms of your salary and (if applicable) the budgets you have responsibility over.

However, this is not necessarily something to get caught up in because there could be factors contributing to your colleagues' (potentially generous) rating or a lack of self-awareness causing you to rate yourself high. This may not be the case, but it is important to point out examples of these types of situations so you can assess whether they hold any weight.

For those who manage a budget, oftentimes their team will rate their financial management abilities high because as long as they receive their paycheck every two weeks, nothing else really matters. Many teams are completely unaware of which activities are the most expensive to the business. Most employees don’t understand the relative dollars they generate from their work and the specifics of why paying their specific salary is a financially responsible decision.

Let’s use a pizza restaurant as an example. Say there are 3 people working inside the pizza place each making $10/hour and an additional manager making $20/hour. On top of that, the cost of running the ovens and the electricity comes out to roughly $5 per hour. If each pizza costs $10 and the company on average sells 10 pizzas every hour, they are driving an average net profit of $45 per hour. If the employees of the pizza place understand this, they can work on ways to try and sell more pizzas in the same hour to improve their own performance and the performance of the company – making them more valuable to the company.

Some leaders might read this story and start playing the “what if” game (e.g. what if my employee's demand raises because they understand the financial impact of their work?), coming up with every bad possible outcome if their employees knew their financial value to the company. But these old thought patterns should be reconsidered with new research.

In research from companies that leverage Open Book Management, companies in which the employees have a greater understanding of the financial implications of the company’s decisions perform better and are more profitable than companies who don’t. Conversations around raises and relative improvements to the business become substantially more tangible and objective when there is hard data justifying and showing how one person’s improved efficiency deserves greater compensation, especially compared to the “everyone gets a raise just because!” method of giving raises.

If you are an individual contributor for your company and you don’t manage a budget, per se, you still manage your time. If you consider your salary as a budget your company has entrusted you to manage, are you optimally using that budget?

One way to make improvements in this area is to identify potential opportunities for you to become more efficient at work. You could ask your boss or co-workers for feedback on ways you can be more efficient at work. And you could also provide some (ideally research or evidence-backed) suggestions for ways you have identified to help make yourself more efficient at work. Your manager will likely appreciate your drive for improvement and the fact that you came prepared with research-backed suggestions on ways you could improve your own efficiency and work output.

Overall, having a self-aware response on your 360-degree assessment report isn’t a free pass to give in to stagnation. It simply shows that you and your colleagues are on the same page. But, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement. The implications from having a self-aware score are not wholly positive or wholly negative. Instead, it is a snapshot of your current performance which can help you make informed decisions about where you need improvement. As long as you possess an open-mindedness about making improvements and are willing to measure whether the new changes worked, you can ensure that you are on a positive track towards continual growth and improvement.

by Garrett Mintz

Sun 31 January 2021

With this data, we can break down the results of a 360-Degree Assessment into three outcomes:

1) Somebody has underestimated their abilities (self-rating lower than colleagues’ ratings),

2) Somebody has overestimated their abilities (self-rating higher than colleagues’),
or
3) Somebody is self-aware about their abilities (self-rating matches colleagues’).

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Overestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Understanding Self-Awareness for 360-Degree Assessments

When somebody is self-aware about their abilities, this means that they gave themselves a similar score as the score their colleagues provided on the same skill.

At Ambition In Motion, our 360-Degree Assessment has 5 core components:

a. People Management,

b. Innovation,

c. Leadership Ability,

d. Communication Skills, and

e. Financial Management.

Communication Skills

If you are your colleagues are in agreement on your communication skills, that is excellent, but that could mean that they agree that you are a poor communicator or a great communicator.

Self-Awareness but poor performance

If your colleagues rated your communication skills relatively low and you agreed with them, that typically is an indicator that there are opportunities for growth.

You may think to yourself “I am in a pretty isolated role and communication isn’t a big part of my work.”

That may seem to be true, but that doesn’t mean that improving your communication skills will be wasteful.

A key component of communication skills is the ability to listen to others. If others believe you are a poor listener and agree with your self-rating, this indicates that you are probably giving off negative physical cues that signal that you aren’t listening AND you aren’t actually listening to what they are saying.

This has negative consequences. If you are struggling to listen to what others are saying, it can be difficult to accomplish any work tasks because you have no idea if you are missing some key information. People can recognize a poor listener and they’ll dislike working with you because they feel like their time spent communicating with you is wasted.

The other key component to communication skills is trusting that others are being open and honest with you.

If you feel like others aren’t being open and honest with you, that is a HUGE red flag. This means that you should reflect onto yourself why you might feel that way about others. Do you feel like people are hiding things from you? Do you feel like people are skirting the truth because they only want to deliver you good news? Do you have any reason to believe that they are being dishonest or withholding the truth? Has something like this happened to you before in the past?

If your colleagues agree with you, ask yourself, why might this be? Are you giving the impression that others must give you the best news, even if that means stretching the truth? This might be a difficult pill to swallow but could this be a possibility? And if this is the case, what are the implications of this? This could mean getting blindsided, surprised, or feeling deceived.

A great example of this is in HBO’s Silicon Valley. The show is about a group of people who found an up-and-coming startup business called Pied Piper. Pied Piper’s major antagonist is the CEO of a large conglomerate named Gavin Belson. Gavin is the type of leader who demands only good news, so much so that his people will lie to him to appease him, even if it makes him look like a fool later. A hilarious example of this rearing its ugly head is when Gavin is launching a new server called “the box”. Because Gavin is a narcissist, he requests that his signature be on every single box so his team creates a contest throughout the entire company to draft the best signature to go on the box. The signature that received the most votes was the signature “Gavin B”, which when displayed in the particular font used, looked like a phallus. The reason this scene is hilarious is because everyone on Gavin’s team can see exactly what it looks like, but Gavin is too self-centered to see anything but his name. Everyone is afraid to tell Gavin the truth, so Gavin moves forward shipping millions of boxes embossed with an ornate phallus prominently on the front.

The point is that if you feel like your team isn’t being open and honest with you and your team doesn’t feel like they can be open and honest with you either, you need to take action to create an environment and setting where others can be honest. This can start with asking for specific feedback on your work and the way you have communicated with others.

Self-Awareness and high performance

If you gave yourself a relatively high score and your colleagues agreed with you then that is excellent. That indicates that your colleagues feel comfortable being open and honest with you and they feel like you are a good listener and overall communicator.

The question one should then consider is the balance between productivity and communication.

If you have an open-door policy or situation where anyone can ask you a question at any time, then you are making yourself available and are clearly making yourself present while having a conversation with those you work with, but are you optimally productive?

Research from Stanford shows that it is impossible to multitask and that mental residue builds up when switching between tasks. Therefore, if anyone can communicate with you at any time, the gaps in time from pausing your work and having a conversation before finally getting back on task are essentially wasted. This is also very true for emails/texts/phone calls/social media. If you focus too much on being available for everyone at every moment, you are sacrificing your ability to get into deep mental focus for the sake of being available to communicate. You are being communicative and present, but you are not being as productive as you possibly can be.

Some people have subsequently adopted office hours where they are open to people jumping in and asking them questions only during certain time periods, minimizing the gap time mental residue that is created from switching tasks.

As new technology comes out, making it easier to communicate with those on our team, there can always be new ways to improve our communication and optimize our performance.

by Garrett Mintz

Sat 30 January 2021

With this data, we can break down the results of a 360-Degree Assessment into three outcomes:

1) Somebody has underestimated their abilities (self-rating lower than colleagues’ ratings),

2) Somebody has overestimated their abilities (self-rating higher than colleagues’),
or
3) Somebody is self-aware about their abilities (self-rating matches colleagues’).

Underestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Overestimating - People Management, Innovation, Leadership Ability, Communication Skills, and Financial Management

Understanding Self-Awareness for 360-Degree Assessments

When somebody is self-aware about their abilities, this means that they gave themselves a similar score as the score their colleagues provided on the same skill.

At Ambition In Motion, our 360-Degree Assessment has 5 core components:

a. People Management,

b. Innovation,

c. Leadership Ability,

d. Communication Skills, and

e. Financial Management.

Leadership Ability

If you gave yourself a score that was consistent with what your colleagues said of you, it can mean that you gave yourself a high score and your colleagues agreed with you or you gave yourself a low score and your colleagues agreed with you.

Self-Awareness but poor performance

If you gave yourself a relatively low score on your leadership ability and your colleagues agreed with you, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad leader and your colleagues have confirmed it. Oftentimes, we give ourselves a low score on our leadership ability out of humility and recognition that leadership is a trait that can always be improved. However, when our colleagues feel like we aren’t strong at leadership either, this can typically be attributed to our ability to communicate.

People tend to perceive others as lacking leadership abilities NOT because of their inability to speak up, but more often because when one does speak up, it is perceived as self-centered and only benefiting the person making the request. Simply, leadership for yourself instead of for the team.

Here is an example of this situation. Many years ago, I was a server and bartender at a restaurant. My manager was a well-intentioned guy who read all the leadership books and constantly talked about how he wanted to improve his leadership abilities. I didn’t give him a 360-degree assessment, but I would imagine that his self-rating on leadership ability would be somewhat low because he recognized that there were areas for growth in his leadership repertoire. The issue was, although he understood the theory and high-level ideas from his books, his implementation of information was off. He never had a pulse for how we, the people who reported to him, felt about his management style and the processes he wanted to implement. To convey the importance of organizational citizenship and helping fellow servers and bartenders, he told all of us a story of a time that he pulled over to help somebody fix a flat tire. His goal was to convey that helping others is the right thing to do and can have a positive impact on the team. However, we noticed that the story was just about him. To us, it felt like he was just patting himself on the back, and because he never gave a resolution (e.g., the person he helped never spoke with him again), it was relatively unclear as to why helping others can have a positive impact on the rest of the team.

The point is that sometimes we can be educated about the theory of what it means to be a leader, but our efforts to implement those leadership strategies may not fully resonate with those we work with unless we ask for feedback and be open to making adjustments after learning the feedback.

Another reason you may have given yourself a low leadership score (and your colleagues agreed with you) could be because you don’t actually believe you are a strong leader and your role doesn’t necessitate that you be a leader.

But being a leader doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have a placard or title labeled leader. Leadership abilities can include helping set expectations for your work with those you work with, taking accountability for mistakes that may happen, and giving acknowledgement to others when they have helped you.

Leadership ability transcends titles and enters into the realm of just being a good professional to work with. Thinking you aren’t good at these skills and then having your colleagues confirm these beliefs can be tough. But it’s no help if you start thinking there is nothing you can or need to do about it. If you don’t work on these components of your professionalism, you become an energy-taker instead of an energy-giver. People will resent working with you because they will perceive you as being selfish and uninterested in the outcome of the team. And if you are actually selfish and uninterested in the outcome of the team, then perhaps it makes sense to reflect on yourself and on your time to figure out the best use of it. There are plenty of jobs out there. If you are working at a company with a team, or just doing work that is uninteresting to you, then perhaps it is time to consider another line of work because the time you are spending doing your current work doesn’t appear to be serving you or those you work with.

Self-Awareness and high performance

If you have a relatively high leadership ability score and your colleagues agree with you, that is excellent, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have achieved the pinnacle of leadership ability.

Leadership ability is an interesting concept because the ultimate measure of success as a leader is both: how does my team feel about working with me AND what outcomes are we achieving as a team.

If you rated yourself highly and your team agrees with you, you can check off half of the box. However, how is your performance? Finding the right balance between output and keeping people satisfied, both doing the work and in your leadership ability, is the key to being the best leader you can be.

Therefore, when it comes to the question of output, you must assess comfort versus optimization. In terms of comfort, the question is: are you and your team achieving a performance level in which 1) the business can operate effectively, and 2) people are satisfied with their compensation? If the answer to either part is no, then you have a big problem. This means you are a supportive leader and your leadership style is appreciated, but it also means that you haven’t set the bar high enough. Something needs to change so the business can run at a level where everyone is comfortable.

There is a tv show on Hulu called Ramy. It is an interesting show about a man in his late 20’s trying to figure out his life. At the beginning of season 1, Ramy is working at a startup. He and his colleagues recognize that they aren’t paid the best, but they believe in the mission and they like the people they work with. Unfortunately, the company performance leaves much to be desired. Eventually, the company isn’t able to drive the revenue or fundraising it needs to survive and everyone gets fired.

This is a small story within the tv show, but it shows that Ramy appreciated the founders of the startup at one point in time (e.g. would have given a high leadership score to the founders), but once the company started to fail and everyone was fired, they all left with a salty taste in their mouth about the entire experience.

There are many factors for why a business eventually fails, but sometimes for fear of being perceived as a bad or overly aggressive leader to our team, we set lower bars for those we work with, even if it means the business can’t run comfortably.

However, if your work exists comfortably (either from a leadership perspective or as an individual contributor), and your leadership ratings are mutually high, then you have to ask yourself if your work is running optimally.

If you are an individual contributor, the incentive may not be as clear as to why you would question this or pursue improvement to the optimum level. You are not necessarily getting compensated any more to make these improvements. As a leader, the motivation for this is pretty obvious – e.g. the better your team performs, the more valuable you are to the company.

But as an individual contributor, a big reason for wanting to improve your output to an optimum level, while maintaining a high level of respect from your colleagues as they perceive your leadership abilities, is control and autonomy. If you show a desire to push the status quo and improve the company’s output, you become substantially more valuable to the company. Being able to identify more efficient and innovative methods while keeping it easy for your colleagues to work with you because you set proper expectations and help them see opportunities that they may not have already seen, you become substantially more valuable to the company. If your company can’t live without you, you will have the control and autonomy to try new things that the company would not trust others to try.

If you ever had a shared family car growing up, this would be like always making sure you return the car to your parents with a full tank of gas (and occasionally a car wash) after you borrow it. Later, when it comes to borrowing the car for a concert 4 hours away, you have a track record of responsibility and respect for your parent’s car.

The key to getting performance to an optimum level is not sacrificing the way your team feels about your leadership ability. The real key to being the best leader you can be is finding the balance between optimum performance and having the respect and support of your colleagues.

BLOG

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360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My People Management Abilities

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360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Innovation Score

The willingness to try new things, even in failure, can improve your innovation score

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Leadership Abilities

Setting clear expectations allows leaders to magnify their ability to influence

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Communication Skills

Listening and building trust are critical to improving communication skills

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Financial Management Abilities

You can be a strong financial manager even if you don't manage a budget

How to Improve Your Financial Management Abilities Even When your Colleagues Agree with your Self Rating on a 360-Degree Assessment Report

Financial management is critical to improve regardless of whether or not you manage a budget

Why a Self-Aware 360-degree Assessment Report on your Communication Skills Can Be An Opportunity for Growth

Improved communication makes every other aspect of work better

How to Become a Better Leader When your 360-Degree Assessment Report Shows you are Self-Aware on your Leadership Abilities

How to recognize there are opportunities to improve when both you and your colleagues share a similar belief on your leadership abilities

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BLOG

Is Gratitude in Conflict with Progress?

How can we manage being both grateful and goal-oriented

Can Innovation Exist Outside of Work?

Do you have Standard Operating Procedures for your work life and family life?

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My People Management Abilities

Your ability to help others do their job better and create an environment where others feel comfortable offering you feedback can make or break your people management score

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Innovation Score

The willingness to try new things, even in failure, can improve your innovation score

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Leadership Abilities

Setting clear expectations allows leaders to magnify their ability to influence

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Communication Skills

Listening and building trust are critical to improving communication skills

360-Degree Assessment: What I can Learn From Overestimating My Financial Management Abilities

You can be a strong financial manager even if you don't manage a budget

How to Improve Your Financial Management Abilities Even When your Colleagues Agree with your Self Rating on a 360-Degree Assessment Report

Financial management is critical to improve regardless of whether or not you manage a budget

Why a Self-Aware 360-degree Assessment Report on your Communication Skills Can Be An Opportunity for Growth

Improved communication makes every other aspect of work better

How to Become a Better Leader When your 360-Degree Assessment Report Shows you are Self-Aware on your Leadership Abilities

How to recognize there are opportunities to improve when both you and your colleagues share a similar belief on your leadership abilities

Recent Keywords

Recent Contributors

Building Mentor Connections Through Work Orientation

Kickstarting Mentorships For Fulfilling Careers