Conflict is Good

The title of my book — Say Hello to the Elephants — was inspired by the reaction most people have to conflict. That is, they sit on their hands and refuse to acknowledge it. I was thinking about this during a team meeting with my managers, some of whom refuse to criticize the named partners at Rose, Snyder, & Jacobs.

Conflict in any organization is important, I told them. What I failed to add is that conflict in any relationship is important. To be clear, conflict doesn’t mean that you hate a person or hold grudges. It means that you simply have an inquisitive mind and ask questions when we see them dangling before us. It means that you have the courage to look at each other and say what is honest. It means that you do what you should be doing and, when something doesn’t seem right, you speak up.

In other words: If you leave an elephant in a room, it will not go away. In fact, according to Ellen James of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, an adult elephant produces up to three hundred pounds of dung a day. If you ignore an elephant too long, you will quickly find out what it is like to walk through a pile of elephant dung.

Finding Clarity Is Painful

Sometimes my clients sound just like my kids: “But Tony, this is hard wooooork. Finding clarity is painful.”

You bet it is. In my book, Say Hello to the Elephants, I tell the story of Doyle. Imagine that Doyle is your fitness trainer, and that you tell Doyle that you have always watned to run a marathon.

“No problem,” he says (of the 26.2-mile race). “It will be easy.”

You smile at him and say, “Swell.”

So you are off and running, expecting it to be a piece of cake based on what your fitness trainer has told you. It will be calming, he says. You will probably have one epiphany after another, similar to those deep, transformational moments during yoga. Doyle leads you to believe that running the marathon will be kind of like relaxing in a Jacuzzi, but different.

You set off running on your first training session. You start hopeful and full of confidence.

Then reality sets in. Your heart is about to burst out of your chest, and you are panting like a thirsty dog. You are convinced that your toenails will rub off, your arches will fall, and you will have shin splints, sweat rashes, strained Achilles tendons, blisters, chafing, and various knee and back ailments along the way. You have only run a half-mile before you decide that running is quite awful.

Swell? More like swelling!

I am simply not cut out for this, you decide, reflecting on Doyle’s claim that it should be easy.

On Day One of training, you quit.

Although it might seem that clarity should be intuitive, the process of reaching clarity is not always easy. Clarity can be difficult to achieve. It does not have to be painful, but it often is. Our choices muddy the waters. Our responsibilities add pressure, and our setbacks seem impossible to overcome.

Pain, at least when it has passed, can be palliative. Imagine for a moment a world in which we could set ambitious, challenging goals and then turn around and attain them without sacrificing a single ounce of blood, sweat, or tears. Not only would that take the “accomplish” out of the accomplishment, but it would also turn your ambitious goals into monotony. You probably would not want to achieve those goals any more. At best, the accomplishments would lack significant meaning.

Maybe your trainer, Doyle, disagrees. “Goals that are easy to reach would not be boring or monotonous,” he says. “That would be fantastic. We could have our cake and eat it too! Sign me up—I love German chocolate cake!”

You should fire Doyle.

Pain gives meaning to our desire and ability to reach goals. It strengthens us, builds our self-confidence and self-worth, and gives us the experience we need to get through the next round of pain. When you have fought for years and years to reach the top—and in the course of those years you have been beaten down, failed on numerous occasions, and rejected by more people than you can count—you will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have earned it once you get to the top. The pain you endured will make the reward sweeter. The scrapes and scars are all badges of courage proving you were challenged. The mettle was tested, and the mettle won.

The pain is priceless.

You hire a new trainer, Lance. Lance’s favorite movie is Predator about a U.S. Special under attack by a hideous creature from outer space known as “the Predator.” Lance’s favorite moment is when a fellow soldier informs the tobacco-chewing Blain that Blain is bleeding. Blain keeps chewing his tobacco, scoping out the terrain, matter-of-factly stating, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

And neither do you. When you have clarity, much of the pain is incidental.

The reward makes the pain irrelevant.

Take Theodore Geisel. In college, Theodore was voted the least likely to succeed. Though his art and writing professors disagreed, Theodore felt he had a knack for drawing and writing, so he sent his work to a number of publishing companies, all of whom rejected his books like clockwork. Twenty-seven publishers said no. (Those grinches!)

And then, publisher twenty-eight said yes.

With that, Theodore Seuss Geisel became Dr. Seuss.

Certainly, being rejected or meeting obstacles can be painful. Disappointment, frustration, and anxiety are normal. But whether that pain blocks you from moving forward is up to you. You can take rejection and let it cut deep, let the pain seer into your being. Or you can say, “I am only looking for one publisher to say yes. This is not the one, but I ain’t got time to bleed, so I will just keep looking,” and move on.

There’s no getting around it: some things are going to hurt. Confronting partnership problems is not easy, nor is it easy to plan for succession, take a new risk, or end a relationship. Our economic slow-down hurts. There is no shortcut. You must have clarity to minister your strength within.

So you tell Lance about your goal of running a marathon. He nods his head. With understanding and support, he says, “Your goal is worthy, and you can do it. It is going to take some time. Many people will not believe that you will succeed. You will have a lot of close calls—a lot of times when you think you cannot do it. Your body will shake. You will feel discouraged, but if you are sure you want to do it, if you want to call yourself a marathoner—a title only 0.13 percent of the population can claim—you can move past the pain. No matter how many disappointments or setbacks you encounter, you can do it. I will be there to help. You are unstoppable.”

You look at Lance and say, “Swell.”

[Today’s blog is modified from “Clarity Planning Takes Effort, and Pain Is Swell,” a chapter from Say Hello to the Elephants.]

Today’s Challenge: Find at least one occasion where you can say, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” Say it, and then go about doing what you should be doing.

You DO Have Control

To some degree or another, almost all of us are feeling a little scattered and out of control. We are unsure of the future. We don’t know what next year (or even next week) will bring. For many of us, this is the first time we’ve felt this out of control.

But the truth is, even now, we are all in control.

I remember having sushi with my daughter during her last year of high school. For the first time, she was realizing that the decisions she was making would impact the rest of her life.

“I am just so out of control. I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m a know-it-all for a dad. I give my children constant pep talks. I’m sure Kate knew she was in store for another enlightening talk from her old man.

“Let’s take a look around the sushi bar,” I told her. “You are probably in control of something here.”

Kate looked at me quizzically, and then she rolled her eyes. “Yeah Dad, I’m in control of what I order next.”

“You sure are,” I said. “And when you get home tonight, are you in control of anything?”

“I’m in control of whether I study or not,” she said.

We proceeded through a litany of seven or eight things she was in control of, and then I gave her my pep talk. It went something like this:

There will always be things inside and outside your control. The key is to focus on those thins you can control. The others will be what they will be, so there is no reason to focus on them.

Then Kate told me her real concern. “I don’t know if I will get into USC,” she said.

And to some extent, this is out of her control. She cannot control the pool of candidates who compete for a spot at USC. She cannot control the subjective factors the review panel will use to judge her application. But she can control how much she studies and how much community service she packs into her schedule.

And if she doesn’t get into USC, other opportunities will be open for her.

And with that thought, Kate ordered her next piece of sushi.

Today’s Challenge: Make a list of ten things you are in control of. When you are feeling like a thimble in the ocean, grab onto one of those things and take control.

Getting Control of Your Business

In the weeks surrounding the market crash, I received more than few calls from clients who basically said, “I don’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t know what to do. I’ve lost a lot of money. Things are not good.”

Things were not good for a lot of people. And though I’m a tax planner and not a financial advisor, I wanted to help. I wanted to give advice to my clients as to how to make that money back. I wanted to give sage advice that extended beyond: “Hang on…don’t do anything. The market went down, it will come back up.”

And then I realized that giving advice was not what I should be doing.

Collectively, we have all lost a lot of money. Collectively, things might not look so god. But instead of focusing on all that money lost, all those opportunities down the drain, let’s take a minute to redefine who we are and what our goals are.

We know that we will live to fight another day. Eventually, the market will come back up. So instead of focusing on all that money lost, let’s talk about who we want to be in the meantime. Instead of looking at the gap between what we had two, three years ago and what we have today, let’s simply look at what we have today.

By focusing on our current capacities, we can stop reacting like thimbles in the ocean to the waves crashing around us. Instead, we begin applying our strengths to address problems with confidence.

In Say Hello to the Elephants I talk about the importance of wielding strengths. Let me take the steal the following from my own book:

Strengths constitute your confidence. Your strengths will give you the confidence to discover hidden problems instead of evading them. Your strengths represent the confidence that gives you the ability to take advantage of opportunities and protect yourself from dangers. Your strengths stop you from standing in front of danger like a deer in headlights. By giving you confidence, your strengths develop, implement, and sustain your solutions. Your strengths will help you plan for various futures, be flexible about the paths you choose, and recognize opportunities others cannot.

Today’s Challenge: Answer the following questions...

• What are my strengths? 
• What attributes, resources, and skills do I have? 
• In what activities do I feel most confident?

Playing From Your Strengths

Do you view your life through your strengths or through your problems?

It has been about a year since all of the market upset, the onset of the recession and this period of doubt, uncertainty and feelings of helplessness. 

In the weeks surrounding the market crash, I received more than few calls from clients who basically said, “I don’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t know what to do. I’ve lost a lot of money. Things are not good.”

Things were not good for a lot of people. And though I’m a tax planner and not a financial advisor, I wanted to help. I wanted to give advice to my clients as to how to make that money back. I wanted to give sage advice that extended beyond: “Hang on…don’t do anything. The market went down, it will come back up.”

The market has come back a very long way but …

I realized that giving advice was not what I should be doing.

Collectively, we have all lost a lot of money, jobs, prospects and maybe perspective. Collectively, things might not look so good. But instead of focusing on all that money lost, all those opportunities down the drain, let’s take a minute to redefine who we are and what our goals are.

We know that we will live to fight another day. The market is back, for how long we don’t know.  So instead of focusing on all that might have been lost, let’s talk about who we want to be in the meantime. Instead of looking at the gap between what we had two, three years ago and what we have today, let’s simply look at what we have today.

By focusing on our current capacities, we can stop our lives of reacting. Instead, we must begin applying our strengths to address problems and obstacles with confidence.

In Say Hello to the Elephants I talk about the importance of wielding strengths.

Let me steal the following from my own book:

Strengths constitute your confidence. Your strengths will give you the confidence to discover hidden problems instead of evading them. Your strengths represent the confidence that gives you the ability to take advantage of opportunities and protect yourself from dangers. Your strengths stop you from standing in front of danger like a deer in headlights. By giving you confidence, your strengths develop, implement, and sustain your solutions. Your strengths will help you plan for various futures, be flexible about the paths you choose, and recognize opportunities others cannot.

Today’s Challenge:
Answer the following question—What are my strengths? What attributes, resources, and skills do I have? In what activities do I feel most confident?

Are You a Building Crew or a Wrecking Crew?

A speaker at a conference I attended recently asked that question.

In other words, do you spend your time building other people up or finding fault and tearing them down? In an economic crisis, doing the latter is easier. If you find faults in and problems with other people, perhaps your own problems won’t seem so dire.

If you are one of these people, you are probably fixating on all the problems rather than throwing solutions onto the table.

Why not start acting as though things are going to get better? When Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937 during the Great Depression, he noted the power of positive verbal affirmation. In fact, he was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie to do a study of the wealthiest people of all time, noting that one of the common characteristics of these people was that they were positive thinkers. Even when things weren’t going right, they came out with positive affirmations about how well things were going.

By the very act of pretending that things were getting better, things got better.

Today’s Challenge: Now is the time to fake it until you make it. If people ask you how things are going, tell them things are unbelievable. Say it positive and enthusiastically. And when other people talk about their problems, give them kudos for all they have accomplished. Encourage them by providing support and affirmation. Become a building crew.

On Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators. Yawn. It’s not a fresh concept for most businesses.

KPIs are those things that help us understand how we are doing. Profit, productivity, cash flow, sales— – these are all KPIs for a business. They don’t have to be dollar- denominated KPIs, they can also be time- based goals, numbers, or instances  of any other meaningful measurement, so long as it is that can be SMART (Specific, Meaningful, Actionable, Relevant and Time Bounded.

Yawn again.

It’s much more interesting to hit the floor running than it is to evaluate KPIs. Start putting out fires and jumping on top of opportunities, right? This is how most of us respond to the challenges that each day brings.

And of course these things are important, but let’s also stay focused on what we should be doing to move past the economic slowdown.

Without identifying our KPIs, we forget what we are supposed to be focusing on, what we are supposed to be doing. Instead, we become like thimbles in an ocean, being tossed about, thrashing and fighting to keep our heads above water.

When you are working on your KPIs, you have much greater control of your own fate. You respond calmly, you have a clear picture of your priorities. You have a compass.

Today’s Challenge: Establish two or three KPIs for yourself. Post them somewhere visible so that each and every day, you are reminded of the meaningful goals you as an individual can work on to manage your world and your success.

My KPIs might seem boring, (boring but they work for me!):

• Ten meaningful contacts with my clients per week;
• Three meaningful contacts with Preferred Providers or other relationships that have a “Bigger Future” every week;
• Keeping ahead of my paperwork by posting my time records in our cost accounting system and dealing with e-mails for any given week by the end of that week.

Emily's Ball

Did you see the human-interest piece about the father and daughter who attended the Phillies game? The father had been dreaming whole life about catching a fly ball. On September 15, he finally did, giving high-fives to the people sitting around him and his three-year-old daughter, Emily. He then handed the ball—a souvenir to have for all time—to Emily.

What happened next will be something Emily’s dad cherishes far more than any ball.

Emily promptly threw the ball back in the direction of the field. As the crowd let out a collective gasp, Emily looked toward her dad. Had she done something wrong?

Without a flinch, Emily’s dad gave his daughter a big hug, a huge grin across his face. Though his daughter had just tossed his prize possession, his look was of total appreciation, reveling in the spontaneity of the moment far more than regretting the lost ball.

What can be learned from this candid moment?

No matter what difficulties you might face, stay focused on the important stuff. A positive experience can be gained from any situation if you look for the positive lessons that can be learned from it. When things do not work exactly the way you expect them to, how about being like Emily’s dad? Understand what is truly important, and appreciate that. 

Most of the time, those things of importance involve people you care about and not about things you care about. In the end, the relationships you preserve can bring you farther than the material possessions you own.

Today’s Challenge:  Take a look at something in your life that you do not consider successful at the moment.  Look at what is going on and re-characterize it as a positive outcome because of the learning you gained from it.   

The Nature of Heroes

I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of the hero: the Rosa Parkses of the world, the airline pilot who last January landed the plane in the middle of the Hudson River, the men and women who are beaten down by the market, who have lost everything they owned, and who still awake each morning with a smile, committed to teaching their children that the world is a bright and benevolent place.

I’m trying to pinpoint the common denominator, and I believe I have found it: heroes do what they are supposed to do. Rosa Parks wasn’t supposed to sit in the back of that bus. The airline pilot—Captain Sully—did what he was supposed to do, and he stayed calm. Every day, men and women wake up and do what they are supposed to do for their children, and that makes them heroes.

The economic slowdown was at least in part because people were not doing what they should have been doing. Were the people who applied for mortgages they could not afford simply because of low teaser rates doing what they were supposed to do? Were the bankers who were giving those mortgages doing what they were supposed to do? Were the politicians over-seeing those banks doing what they were supposed to do?

The blame is almost endless, and it has already been well distributed.

Last year, I wrote a book: Say Hello to the Elephants: A Four-Part Process for Finding Clarity, Confronting Problems, and Moving On. The book could have been just as easily titled: Doing What We Should Be Doing: Finding Solutions and Moving On.

And now, I want to focus on this exact topic. This blog—What We Should Be Doing—is a complement to my book, with bi-weekly thoughts about what businessmen and women should be doing: working together to find ways to move past the economic slowdown, finding our problems, dealing with them, and waking up each morning to a bright and benevolent world.

–Tony Rose is the author of Say Hello to the Elephants: A Four-Part Process for Finding Clarity, Confronting Problems, and Moving On.