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Acknowledging Impact of Auto-Self on Success:
Topic highlights: ▪ Thinking-Self Success Factors ○ Framing Realities Realistically ○ Handling Complexity Intuitively ▪ How Many Ways Does the Auto-Self Affect Success? Let Me Count the Ways!
Because we so thoroughly understand how to acquire new
knowledge,
When we operate in our cognitive, thinking, knowledgeable mode, we say our thinking-self controls our activities. When we display involuntary behaviors, and when "paradigms" or "cultures," constrain our thoughts and understanding, we say our auto-self controls us.
The following diagram illustrates the new distinction that opens up so many possibilities for performance improvement. The icon on the left represents the prevailing uniform view of the mind, which for most people is informal and implicit. The two icons on the right symbolically represent distinct components of the bipartite mind. Because we are venturing into new territory, we will use these representations of the two modes of our bipartite mind as repeated reminders that we have two components and to focus attention on the component we are speaking of at any time.
The choice of the thinking-self icon should be obvious. We use the robot-with-a-brain icon to represent our auto-self because this internal mechanism controls aspects of us that work as if we have a "robot within." This "robot within us" gets programmed partially through human nature and our own particular genetic makeup, partly through non-planned environmental pressures, and sometimes through specific social programming such as when parents condition their children to behave reasonably and when schools instill patriotism. Almost all of this happens to us, and once initially programmed, our inner robot resists change. The major challenge addressed at this website is how we (the thinking-self, success oriented, planning aspects of "us") can seize control and arrange to program or reprogram crucial aspects of our auto-self so we can achieve peak performance as a means to attain and sustain success. While much of our auto-self operates like an inner robot for which we have only limited reprogramming access, there is a crucial distinction between our auto-self and human-constructed robots. Our auto-self controls us through feelings, which drive our bad habits, sometimes cause us to procrastinate, and create a formidable barrier to self-discovery and to transformational performance improvements.
While both the thinking-self and auto-self play crucial roles in attaining and sustaining success, people systematically develop their thinking-self through such knowledge creation mechanisms as schools, books, lectures, and the Internet. Mechanisms for improving the thinking-self are well-organized, readily available, and effective. The best opportunity to enhance success, therefore, is to create equally effective mechanisms to improve our robot-like auto-self.
We refer to thinking-self success practices as "hard" (solid) success factors because we apply them explicitly and normally can measure our results. Some common examples of thinking-self success factors follow:
Because they have been so elusive and are difficult to measure, businesspeople refer to auto-self success activities as "soft" success factors.
Five different ways positive auto-self characteristics raise personal performance and improve business success:
We cannot control these five success factors through knowledge or intentions because we perform them involuntarily. If the way we perform these activities undermines our success, we must find a way to construct new auto-self characteristics or transform (erase and replace) the way they automatically control us.
This success attribute seems almost trivial. When you know what to do, do it! But, wait – do you know anyone who sometimes procrastinates? Isn't procrastination failing to take an action that we have identified to aid our success?
Jerry leads a department that operates in a matrix organization. Jerry's intelligence and deep knowledge about his area of responsibility make him very effective at most aspects of his job. However, he routinely failed to attain results from colleagues who did not report to him. The process of trying to persuade people to execute needed activities created unrecognized discomfort for Jerry. As a result, he uncontrollably failed to move them to action to his own detriment because he could not meet his commitments if others did not deliver to him on time. This blockage to action stymied Jerry's career advance. His previous boss had left the company, and Jerry very much wanted a promotion to his former manager’s job. A senior executive in his company told me, "We are not going to promote Jerry and see if he can step up to greater responsibility. Instead, we are going to provide him a coach, and if he learns to perform at a higher level, we will promote him. If he cannot step up, we will hire a new manager for him."
Jerry's management engaged me to coach him to overcome his performance deficit. Jerry summed up his experience with coaching as follows, "When I first entered coaching, I have to say I was skeptical. As I reflect on it, I simply didn't know what I didn't know. I could not understand why the company did not promote me earlier; I thought I was executing extremely well. As I learned to recognize and manage automatic activities that had eluded me, I understood my previous limitations that had blocked my promotion. I was letting blockages to actions undermine my effectiveness in spite of what I thought were my best efforts. I no longer go to the bosses of people who don't work directly for me whining that they won't cooperate. I now have a new ability to obtain commitments and hold people accountable, which enabled me to achieve excellent results last year from people outside of my organization."
Shortly before our
coaching engagement ended, Jerry received the promotion he longed for but feared he would never realize. After our coaching
engagement ended, Jerry bought
me dinner to celebrate his promotion, and he enthusiastically told me, "This process worked so well for me that I
now use it on people who report to me. When they come to me complaining that they can't get actions from people
outside our organization, I apply some techniques you used on me and send them out to try again."
We must consistently "do," or execute, the tasks necessary to achieve success. However, to succeed over the long haul, leaders must temper execution with behaving in ways that do not create personal success at the expense of others and therefore of their company.
George, a senior manager in a manufacturing company, has no blockages to getting into action. In fact, he is all action. However, he used to think so poorly of others who did not share his drive that he would become enraged and aggressive when they did not meet the high standards he set for them and himself. This caused colleagues and subordinates to avoid contact with him whenever they could. Far from spurring greater action, aggressive behavior blocks the creativity and drains the energy from those exposed to it. Although repeatedly warned to rein in his dysfunctional behaviors, George made little headway. Self-help to overcome aggressiveness rarely produces the desired results. To capitalize on his deep knowledge and consistent execution, his company engaged me to coach George to curtail his overbearing behaviors. Within a few weeks, colleagues began to notice and comment on how pleasurable it had become to work with George. For the first time, others could appreciate his outstanding talents and value to the company. During his coaching engagement, George's company promoted him.
Aggressive leaders often achieve short-term results but normally at the devastating price of undermining long-term success. Irrepressible dominators rely on fear as an external motivator and are satisfied with extracting grudging compliance instead of eliciting much more effective internal motivations of enthusiasm, energy, and commitment. Aggressive, intimidating, and micromanaging behaviors sap the energy and creativity of the recipients of these counterproductive behaviors. The days when Boards hire and celebrate infamous CEOs like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap are ending. Dunlap devastated Sunbeam, but other less dramatic examples still play out in many organizations. I have coached many smart, hard driving, results-oriented leaders who executed most aspects of their job excellently but won the prize as the CDO (Chief Demotivation Officer). CDOs repeatedly demotivate those around them – sometimes driving valuable employees out of the organization because star performers didn't have to tolerate aggressive behavior. They operate like vacuum cleaners; but instead of sucking unwanted dirt and dust off the floor, they suck crucial drive and creativity out of everyone around them. Fortunately, once people recognize how much their behavior demotivates others and lowers their sustained output, they can change successfully through coaching. For long-term success, leaders must focus not only on achieving results but also on how they achieve those results.
Both doing consistently and behaving non-disruptively are examples of the auto-behavior mechanism of the auto-self. Thus, in business, success falters when we fail to execute needed actions or we behave in ways that adversely affect those around us. We maximize our success when we overcome any uncontrollable performance deficits and behavior excesses.
Framing Realities Realistically:
I often begin speeches on the auto-self by asking, "Who has heard of the term ‘thinking outside the box’?" All hands usually go up. Then I ask, “What is ‘the box?’ Where does it reside? How does it work?" I rarely receive insightful answers, but these questions spark thinking about hidden assumptions and beliefs that create the perceptual "lenses" through which we understand and interpret our realities. These auto-self contextual frameworks, which we refer to as auto-contexts, imperceptibly control such previously perplexing concepts as the "box," paradigms, and cultures.
Wang Laboratories dominated word processing beginning in the mid-1970s by selling proprietary hardware and software. External observers realized the PC would obsolete Wang's proprietary hardware. Wang's success path would have been to transfer its software to the PC. However, Wang’s culture blocked needed change because it dictated the company sells high-margin hardware. Wang squandered its market dominance and eventually exited the word-processing market because it remained trapped in an obsolete shared auto-context that we refer to as a business culture.
People in companies share auto-contexts about business factors such as market position, competition, and growth strategies. These auto-contexts create a company’s business culture. Organizational cultures provide stable contexts that enable orchestrated efforts toward a common goal. Auto-contexts also create the framework that enables the thinking-self to create incremental improvements. This serves companies well as long as the business environment remains stable. However, when the business environment evolves to the point where the basic rules of the game need to change, the auto-contexts that make up the culture must also change. Auto-contexts inherently resist change, so this "culture lock" often leads to business failures, as happened at Wang. The systematic approach to revealing and managing auto-contexts developed at this website provides the key to overcoming this problem.
Many characteristics contribute to excellent leadership. Among the most important are motivating, persuading, resolving conflicts effectively, giving robust performance reviews empathetically, and creating change in individuals and cultures. While each of these has a thought-process component, automatic actions dominate leadership abilities. That is why leadership and leadership development have remained in the "soft" part of business understanding. Primary mechanisms for excellent leadership include interpersonal and public speaking skills. We refer to these as auto-skills because once constructed they operate without any conscious effort. Examples of auto-skills outside business include sports and music skills. Creating self-motivation requires instilling feelings (in the auto-self) that drive the motivation. We share a basic human characteristic of experiencing discomfort-caused resistance to deep (auto-self) change even when we recognize the benefits of the change. As a result, guiding individuals to change their deep-seated behaviors or leading culture change requires skillfully guiding people through their discomfort to enact the desired change.
Handling Complexity Intuitively
Some highly experienced people have specialized "tacit" (as opposed to explicit) knowledge, referred to as “expertise," which manifests through mysterious abilities we call “hunches,” "gut feelings," or “intuitive” insights that seem to emanate from out of nowhere. The source of these flashes of useful knowledge has been difficult to identify or describe, especially in business circles. Auto-expertise is the auto-self mechanism that creates insights by revealing patterns and relationships in complex systems rather than sequentially analyzing the parts as the thinking-self does. Auto-expertise operates in the background, outside of our awareness; thinking-self calculations become the center of our attention and therefore our awareness. To illustrate the difference, no matter how smart a novice chess player is, he has no chance against an expert chess player. The former knows the rules and calculates as many moves ahead as time and intelligence allow. The chess master expertly recognizes familiar patterns without making all the laborious calculations. The same pattern recognition occurs for expertise in complex business situations.
In his book, Winning, when JackWelch speaks of making “gut” decisions, he implicitly refers to using auto-expertise. He writes, "Much has been written about the mystery of gut, but it's really just pattern recognition, isn't it?" The ability to recognize patterns and relationships is one of the properties of the auto-self.
Another example of auto-expertise comes from the book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. He indirectly recognizes the auto-self when he discusses "the second part of our brain." He addresses auto-expertise when he says, "The...most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled."
How Many Ways Does the Auto-Self Affect Success? Let Me Count the
Ways!
Having established the importance of explicitly recognizing our dual natures and having identified five ways our automatic activities affect success, we can now lay the foundation to implement systematic improvements of otherwise uncontrollable actions and thought patterns by revealing the properties of the auto-self.
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