SST® Newsletter
Fall 2003
Stress
This has been a period of transition for me. While waiting for a new place in State College, I am bivouacked at my Ocean City, Maryland condo. What it lacks in space, it makes up for with the sounds and sights of the Atlantic Ocean. I also lost my Dad to a long term illness about a month ago.
I have had a lot of time for beach walking reflection enhanced by the companionship of my nine year old Sheltie, Rosey O’Grady. One of the topics I have been contemplating, obviously I guess, is stress. I suspect you know that there is a stress assessment that assigns different weights to life experiences. Moving and loss of a loved one are near the top of the list. According to that assessment at least, I have had a lot of stress recently.
Here are my meager musings on stress:
q We can only manage it. We cannot extinguish it.
q We have little control over when some stress causing events are going to happen. When we can control them, however, we should
q Balance is important.
o Jungian theory holds that there are four mental functions as illustrated in the SST logo (Sensing, Intuition, Thinking & Feeling)
o In times of stress, we tend to over use our most natural or strongest mental function making it important to remind ourselves to use the others
o The short hand on this is that your two stronger functions are the ones appearing in your four letter code: ISTJ
o Get the facts right (Sensing); consider the Big Picture (Intuition); apply logical criteria (Thinking); and don’t forget the impact on people (Feeling)
o You may recognize this as the Z Problem Approach we teach
q Exercise is great for stress management.
o Years ago a team of researchers sought to compare the impact of different counseling approaches on several small groups
o As I recall, one received a directive and rational approach ( Ellis); another got client centered counseling ( Rogers); and a third received Gestalt counseling (Perls)
o A fourth didn’t get any counseling; just regular exercise
o You guessed it; the fourth group made the greatest progress
q One stress management technique is to conjure up an image of the worst case scenario and to think through what you would do if it happened
o Usually, we find that we can manage even the worst case
o And, the worst case rarely happens
q Personally, I found watching excessive amounts of baseball to be good.
q My own bias is that treating stress with drugs is bad
o I’m using the word “drug” broadly, but correctly, to include alcohol as well as prescription drugs
o If we become dependent on drugs, which I believe is inevitable, the only solution is more drugs
q It is always better to give stress than to get it
o This is only half in jest
o We find many a leader who is all stressed out over certain members of his or her team
o Be careful of the old “reverse delegation trick” and send the stress back down
q If you want more of what you got, keep doing what you are doing
o I don’t know the source of that saying but I like it a lot.
o Often we get comfortable with a routine and friendly with the devil we know
o Usually, we are the ones managing our lives. If we are not, we should be
o Sometimes we need to make big changes as Michael Dell did as described in the following article.
Some people have observed that, as a group, those of us in sales like stress more than those attracted to other occupational fields. Perhaps that is true. Here’s hoping you don’t get more stress than you want and that if you do, that you are able to manage it….Hope you enjoy the next article and that you are having a great fall……..Arnie
Michael Dell & Adaptable Leadership
This week’s cover story (November 3) of Business Week caught my eye. Once I opened the cover and found, “ What You Don’t Know About Dell: The management secrets of the best run company in technology” I was even more intrigued because the leadership growth of Michael Dell it chronicles sounds remarkably similar to the work Harry Koolen and I are doing with our Adaptable Leader program.
In case you have been living in a cave, Dell was the boy wonder who began selling computers from his college residence hall room employing a direct mail model for distribution and beating up on the likes of IBM. According to BW, nineteen years later Michael is worth $17 billion and his company is about to top $40 billion in sales. Who says it doesn’t pay to cut class now and then?
The focus of the BW article however, is on recent history and how Dell transformed his leadership style which was characterized by staff as “impersonal” and “emotionally detached”. A “personality test”, the MBTI1 to be sure, showed that Dell was an “off the charts Introvert”.
What Dell did next is the heart of the story. He did something about it.
Rather than taking the easy course of, “I am the leader so you adapt to me”, Dell changed his style. He made a commitment to his team to overcome the negative perceptions of his leadership style and “vowed to forge tighter bonds with his team”
To be fair, one of the principal reasons why leaders don’t make changes in their styles is they don’t know how. It is one thing to field 360 degree feed back or read a personality profile, but quite another to make changes in how you lead.
This is where the Adaptable Leader program can help. Drawing upon two rock solid theories (the MBTI and Schutz’s FIRO2), we can quickly surmise what it is that those we lead “want” and put customized leadership strategies in place. Recently, Paul Gennart of Fortis Bank in Brussels made this estimation of our approach:
“I got so much in such a short period. We intend to extend the process to the whole management team of Global Markets".
The great news in this approach is that we can learn to be better leaders. The BW article on Dell points out that he is hardly a “natural leader” possessing neither Jack Welch’s “tough-guy charisma” nor Sam Walton’s “folksy charm”.
But, he understood that his success required more than the brilliance of his direct sell distribution system. It needed to be complemented with the softer skills of leadership. BW concludes that it it’s how Michael Dell “manages the company” that has led to Dell’s (both Michael’s and the business’) amazing success.
1The MBTI is the world’s leading personality inventory and, for first time readers of this newsletter, is based on the same Jungian personality model as SST®. The key differences are that SST® focuses on the selling process and employs no paper and pencil forms while the MBTI is an inventory with multiple applications.
2 FIRO stands for Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation which, like the MBTI, has been around since World War II. It helps us understand our own interpersonal needs and how to adapt to those of others.