Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [17]
Goldsmith, in his work with high-level executives, who mostly have huge egos, has tried to develop coaching techniques that mitigate the natural human tendency to first avoid and then reject any information about our deficiencies. For instance, instead of giving people feedback about what they have done right and wrong in the past, he focuses on “feedforward,” which emphasizes what people need to do to get ready for the subsequent positions and career challenges they will confront. The idea is this: when people focus on what they need to get to the next stage of their careers, they are less defensive. This is very clever: focusing on what you need to change to accomplish future personal goals can be much more uplifting than going back and reviewing past setbacks or considering areas of weakness. I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but just as improving the décor of a house when you stage it for sale requires a walk-through in which you and others assess what needs to be changed, enhancing your own skills requires the same sort of evaluation of your own areas for improvement.
Here’s a suggestion. After considering the personal qualities described later in this chapter, do a self-assessment exercise. Grade yourself on a scale of 1 (“I don’t have this quality at all”) to 5 (“I have a lot of this quality and can readily use it”) on each of the attributes. Better yet, have others grade you as well. And then, either by yourself or with a friend, develop a specific action plan for building those qualities where you scored the lowest. Regularly review your progress, and make sure you are continuing to develop those personal qualities that help build power.
And recognize a second challenge in your self-assessment. Even if you are willing to do the emotionally tough work of being clinically objective about your strengths and weaknesses, you may not have the requisite expertise to know how or what to improve. Simply put, knowing what you’re doing wrong requires already having some level of knowledge and skill—and if you had the knowledge and skill to recognize your mistakes, you probably wouldn’t be making them in the first place!
I get asked for various kinds of help all the time—questions about the business literature, requests to meet and provide career advice or to assist people facing political difficulties inside their companies. I am sure many people receive such requests, often out of the blue and frequently over the Internet because there is so little anonymity these days. In most instances, the reason the person is having a particular problem is evident in how the request is made: no attempt to provide any sort of evidence of similarity or social connection; no understanding of the other’s perspective as the recipient of such a request; no explanation as to how I, as the target, was selected. And if the question is school-or project-related, there is often no familiarity with or mastery of the subject matter. Later in this book we will meet Ray, an effective, book-smart human resources executive and leadership trainer who lost his job to organizational politics. Talking to Ray convinced me that although he was tremendously knowledgeable about designing leadership training, and a hard worker with great values, he understood little about the political dynamics inside companies—and because of that, he did not know what he did not know.
This situation is not unusual. Cornell social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning did pathbreaking research about a decade ago showing that people without the requisite knowledge to perform a task successfully also lacked the information and understanding required to know they were deficient, and in what ways.6 For instance, people who scored in the 12th percentile on tests of grammar and logic thought they were in the 62nd percentile. Not only did they overestimate their own performance; they also had difficulty assessing