Claire Hughes Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…That's right, they haven't. The book has an exercise that I recommend in it that's a little bit more about crystallizing your personal values, but that's kind of the place you want to start. And it's essentially there's a whole menu, and you can find these online, of say 70 or 80 different values. And by values, I mean family, ambition, impact competition. People value education. People value different things differently, by the way. And there's no judgment. You might value being a very competitive person and I might value collaboration above competitiveness, and that's fine. We probably would both be very effective in a team for different reasons, right? So basically if you take a list of values and you say, okay, if I had to pick 10 of these that matter to me, then if I had to pick five of them, and then you really force yourself if I had to only pick three of them... And it's actually good to have this in a dialogue with someone that you work with or well, and you sort of had to explain, well, why? Why, when I'm really pushed, do I have to hold on to say education or learning as a value? Or why do I have to hold on to integrity as a value? And I tell a story in the book about a manager I worked with where transparency was a very important value to him. And the thing is you usually have a story behind that value, right? And in the book, I use the name Eli for him. Eli ends up sharing this story at this offsite that we had. And the transparency value actually was a little bit problematic to manage because Eli would tell everyone everything, including his team, even when we weren't finished with the plan, right? But Eli got up and told a story of being younger, like seven or eight, and realizing his mother was very sick, and no one really told him what was going on. And then unfortunately watching the process of her dying and then being taken out to lunch by his stepfather and told, "Your mother is gone." And okay, well, your whole worldview kind of explodes when you hear that, and you're like, oh, okay, this transparency thing is really real. This was a formative experience for him and it has changed how he operates, and it will probably have changed it for his whole life. And if you can get to that point on your own, of telling yourself, what was the story? What was the thing that made this so important to me? Then you're starting to be in a mode of self-discovery and then you're starting to document, okay, if these are my three top values, and here's why. And then I think what you want to look for are my, what I would call my work style tendencies? And so you get your values, and then you sort of go on a... I'm sorry, I could go on about [inaudible 00:32:08]. I warned you. I wrote a book about this. But basically, all these work style assessments, Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, you name it. And by the way, I would take all of them because I find that very good. I mean some of it's just data. You're just taking on data. e work style assessments, Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, you name it. And by the way, I would take all of them because I find that very good. I mean some of it's just data. You're just taking on data. But a lot of them come down to are you introverted or extroverted? Are you more introverted or extroverted? Where are you on that continuum? And are you more task, if you kind of picture a horizontal and a vertical, are you more task or people oriented? And so I would take your values, and then I would plot yourself. Am I a more extroverted task-oriented person, which means you're kind of a director, get what done kind of person? Or am I a more extroverted people-oriented person, which might mean actually you're probably great at being very charismatic and building some followership and maybe selling a vision? A lot of salespeople are very extroverted people oriented people. And then you start to see, okay, if this is my sort of tendency in my default and this is my value system, what are the ways that I operate that really make up who I am and becomes almost a belief system. And my operating principles in the book, one is to build self-awareness, to build mutual awareness. Another one is say the thing you think you cannot say. I think that I've come to believe that often your biggest strength, one, is also your weakness, but two, is something that you don't know is a big strength because it's almost like breathing. For me, saying something actually fairly openly and directly but in a non-threatening way is a thing I do. John Collison actually once said to me, he's like, "It's so interesting when you give feedback, that can be actually pretty brutal, I leave feeling really optimistic." But I don't mean to be brutal, but I think I can sort of unpack and say this thing, like here's my observation, here's going on, and it's not judgmental, it's not threatening, it's actually opening up an opportunity for people. So say the thing you think you cannot say. You would actually find that more of us can do that. And then I come back to distinguish between being a leader and a manager, which is something early in my career, I did not do well, Lenny. Before we get to that one actually, just to briefly ask you a follow up question, because I love that you're getting through all four here. This is great. But I was going to ask, is there something.. So clearly, you're really good at saying the thing you cannot say, and I love that. Many people are not good at this.…

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