An easy way to stop learning

Did you know that there is no learning without feedback? I heard Prof. Marian Diamond speak on this topic many years ago.  She’s an expert in the brain and is still working at 85.

She is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. I was lucky enough to meet her. Till I heard her talking about feedback, I had no idea how important it was. I thought it was dry and boring. Just something you had to do in a performance review or appraisal and perhaps once or twice a year.

Now I know better. The important thing to realise is that by not giving or getting enough feedback, you are not learning as much as you could be. You are making your life more difficult than it has to be. You are not moving forward and improving.

No learning

Have you seen people (or companies) who make the same mistake again and again? We all have.

One of the key reasons for this is just not checking information you already have about the results of your actions. You often don’t need to get feedback from others; you can get the information yourself. And that’s all feedback is: information.

It’s information that helps you to make a decision on what to do next time.

A small example of feedback working

I worked with Anne, a finance manager. She had a team member who was unreliable. He often did not complete tasks when they were required. Many of her requests were sent by email.

We printed them all out and she put them into two piles. The ones he had complete on time and the ones that had not been completed on time.

There was a clear different in the way she had asked him to complete the task. When she had given a specific time or date, the tasks were done promptly. Where she had said they were ‘urgent’ or ‘really important’ (with not date) they had not been completed on time.

So her feedback was clear – to get tasks completed on time, Anne needed to give a specific date.


Find out how to get feedback and make sure others get it.

Why books are bad for you

So often people fight against change and have all kinds of reasons for it. Apparently the ancient Greeks (Aristotle, Plato and friends) thought books were bad.

They thought that having books would stop people bothering to learn things off by heart.
Judging by the people who come along on my workshop “Improve your memory now and for the rest of your life” I would agree.

What surprised me the most recently was that on one of the workshops not a single person knew anything off by heart. Absolutely nothing. They professed to be amazed that I could recite an entire poem. So the Greeks were right.

Memory

The trouble is that not using your memory does mean that you get out of the habit of remembering things. Having a good memory is all about using tools and techniques to remember things.

If you use the right tools and practice them you can improve your memory quite drastically in a very short space of time. 

On the workshop there is a little memory test where you do your best to remember a series of 20 words. Most people who come on the workshop manage to improve their score substantially over the three hours. Some even double it.

It’s not magic, it’s just trying out a few techniques.

So are books really bad?
Of course books in themselves are not bad. What is bad is letting your faculties go, becoming lazy and allowing yourself to go into decline.

If they didn’t like books, what would the Greeks have said about TV? Personally I love watching something good on TV. But I wouldn’t want to sit all day every day watching TV, though it would be easy to do.

It would be easy to stop using my memory. I have a phone that does my shopping lists and reminds me to do just about everything. So it’s very tempting to get lazy. Then you find that, when you need it, your memory doesn’t work.

The trouble is that, if you are not careful, these useful tools become crutches.

Once you become totally reliant on them you are lost when they fail or are taken away.

I used to work with a chap who had had polio. He walked with two sticks. He told me once that he had been offered a wheelchair several times by well-meaning medical staff. But he never accepted. He said; “Once you get in a chair, you never get out.”

Improve your memory now. Get the recording of my teleseminar "How to Improve Your Memory"

How do you help people to deal with big changes?

Many organisations are having to deal with this situation at the moment. It's not easy, but there are things you can do to make it easier.

To help people deal with the shock and worry of thinking they might lose their job, go through some of the research on how your brain responds in these situations and what you need to do about it.

When we did this in a short workshop for one client they had people spontaneously thanking the HR department for running the workshop.

We got people to talk about how they felt (research shows that just doing this helps people to feel better immediately). We explained to them how they are likely to start behaving, how that isn’t going to help them in the long term.

Then we gave them some tools to help them in dealing with the situation including:

• A way to keep focussed on the long term
• Key actions to take to avoid getting depressed
• Ways of supporting each other

When you look at why some people survive major disasters and others don’t, you often see that those who survive knew what to do beforehand. They had been trained. It’s exactly the same here.

If you know and recognise the signals, you can take action to minimise the problems. You can be prepared for change, particularly unwelcome change, and put your plan into action as soon as it happens.

Often our clients have many employees that really don’t like change at all. Unfortunately many of these companies will be going through massive changes over the next year or so.

But some of their best people are the ones who don’t like change. So it’s really worth making an effort to help them.

For more on this People who don't like change - why they are so valuable

The cost of poor ‘Soft Skills’

We have a little tool on our website called the 'Difficult People Calculator'.

It asks you various questions about a difficult person you are dealing with, such as how much of your time they are taking up per week, how many sales you have lost as a result of their behaviour and so on.

The cost is always at least twice what you think it is. Last year I ran a client through some figures on an extremely difficult person in his department who had some serious behaviour issues including that he bullied some of his staff.

At the end of the discussion he totted up the figures and said the cost was £1m. I asked how long she had been there. “12 years.” He responded.

“So that’s about £80,000 a year.” I said.
“No.” He answered. “I meant she’s costing us £1m EVERY YEAR.”

He was pale as he checked his figures. He recognized that they were correct. He just hadn’t really added it up before.

The trouble with ‘soft skills’ is that you often just put up with the problem and don’t realise how much of a problem it is. You’ve lived with it for 12 years, so what’s another year?

Soft skills problems can be fixed

Soft skills can be improved, often without much effort. The individual just needs some help. Sometimes it can be as simple as making sure they get the feedback they need. Other times it can be a bit more tricky. But remember to balance up the cost of doing nothing before you complain about the cost of a cure.

Difficult People Calculator  Try it now.

Why is there still so much bullying?

Bullying happens when people aren’t getting what they want and try to get it in a way that ignores the needs of others.
There are two key issues:

• The behaviour of the person doing the bullying
• The way the recipient responds

If you change either you can stop the bullying.

To change the first, people have to:

• Know how their behaviour is coming across
• Be able to negotiate with others effectively

To change the second, anyone on the receiving end needs to:

• Recognise bullying behaviour
• Know how to respond in a way that stops the bullying and enables the other party to negotiate

What’s really good to know is that, as the recipient you can stop the bullying. What’s more worrying to know is that we have all bullied others at times and that we are often completely unaware of the fact that we are doing it.

Many years ago, I fell and cut my head open. I went to the Queen’s Medical Centre – a hospital that is a quarter of a mile square, so quite big.

I waited in casualty for hours. There was no queue. There had been no multiple pile up, there was no ‘flu epidemic. I was almost the only person there. But, for some reason it took something like five hours before I saw a member of the medical staff.

The gash on my forehead was still wide open and I had broken two teeth. I had not eaten for hours.

When I finally did see a nurse I asked her politely when I might get to see a doctor.

As soon as she had gone, my husband said he thought I had been ‘a bit short’ with the nurse. I thought I had been very polite. I remember being very polite. However, with the benefit of what I know now, I suspect I might have come over as a little aggressive. But it didn’t feel like that to me at the time. It rarely does.

I think there is still so much bullying because so many people are not taught how to deal with it, or to recognise when they are bullying others.

Only yesterday I worked with a client who asked me how she could deal with her “difficult” manager. After a minute or two it was clear to me that he was bullying her. Yet he is a director of quite a large company.

To stop bullying we all need to be able to deal with it effectively and to take action whenever we encounter it so that no one thinks it’s OK to bully others. Everyone needs to know how to negotiate properly. And we have to stop promoting people who bully others, especially not into senior positions.

As a result of working with some clients recently who had been on the receiving end of some particularly nasty bullying, I have updated my downloadable book “How to Deal With Bullies”. It now includes over 10 pages on how to deal with malicious bullying. I’ve put it on special offer just for this week.

To find out what's in it, use this link.

The cost of poor performance at senior levels

So often you hear people telling you that the middle levels of management are the most skilled and the people at the top 'won't even come on the courses'?

Here’s why I think you get these problems:

1. Those in top jobs are often motivated by money and power (but not necessarily in that order) and so don't care at all about 'people'.
2. The job has grown and the individual has not
3. The top people have no idea how bad they are and are too afraid/proud/arrogant to find out (and no one will tell them)
4. The promotion/recruitment processes for people at these levels are very poor or non-existent

So what can we do about it?

What Motivates Them?

You need to work out what’s important to the people at the top and focus on that.

Let them know:

• How much money they are losing 
• How much more money they could make if they did them differently

This can be hard if you think people should develop themselves for the sake of it, or simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Cost of Poor Performers at Senior Levels

The higher up you are, the greater the impact of your mistakes. When you are lower down, if you do something wrong people don’t seem slow to come forward and tell you about it. They make a big thing of it and bring it up in your appraisal.

When you are very senior, you often seem to end up being promoted.

Isn’t it time we started paying more attention to performance at the top and to how we recruit these people?

Big Rewards for Improvement

The other side of the coin is that improvements at the top can have a huge positive impact. So if you want to get some really big improvements you need to start there.

For more help with this get my booklet

How To Deal With Poor Performance