A Glimpse at Blitz The Ladder's Blitz Approach
By Todd Rhoad
In a recent online survey, business professionals identified numerous barriers to achieving the career success they desire. Listed among the 14 barriers identified were fear, risk, embarrassment, no opportunities, too difficult to shine, no real hard skills to market, can’t market own abilities, competition and don’t network effectively. Do these problems resonate with you? In working with others to help them achieve success in the workplace, these barriers are often identified as the detriment to achieving the things they want. But why? Are these barriers even real? Many times they are not. My mother-in-law has always been terrified of tornados. So much so that just the mention of the word causes her stress. Yet, she’s never had any real, close experiences with a tornado. Maybe our minds create similar effects on us in the workplace. Are these barriers ‘real’ or are they something we just perceive as a barrier?
In my book, Blitz the Ladder, I show you a team-based strategy with a few methods for achieving your success by simply managing perception. This includes your self-perception and how others perceive you. Before you can maximize the usefulness of my methods, you must understand your beliefs and how they affect your perceptions.
While the world we live in is a physical world that we see and touch, we tend to live in the perceived world in our minds. Everyone sees things differently, so they have different experiences. Even though we see the same things, we don’t take away the same meaning, or perception. This meaning is attached to the experience, which eventually becomes our beliefs. My kids, for example, are learning to form their own perceptions. Earlier, they would question me a million times a day, “why?” Once I explained what they saw, they attached this meaning to it. Hopefully, as they grow older, they will continue to question it and modify the meaning as they learn more. Eventually we quit questioning why and our beliefs become fixed.
Looking back at the list of barriers, respondents had identified
‘too difficult to shine’ within their organization. Is
it really too difficult? Maybe they tried a few times and it only
resulted in failure so they attached the meaning that it is just
too difficult. Then, these past experiences become the knowledge of
our beliefs. Once theie belief is fixed; that is, it’s too
difficult, their behavior will follow. If they try to outshine the
competition again, they may simply cease to question the result,
accept it as failure. Eventually, they will quit trying. Outshining
others when you fail to try really is difficult.
There is another downside to this cycle. Not only do you perceive
your efforts as failure, others may perceive the same thing. Your
manager may see that you don’t try very hard to complete your
goals. He/she may not know that you don’t try hard because
you think it won’t get you anywhere even if you do a great
job. Not only does your perception hurt you, the perception of
others will limit your potential as well (to some extent).
Once you realize that some of your beliefs may be incorrect and
that you can change them, my team-based approach really propels you
forward. In my Blitz Approach, you select a few people to become
part of your team. Each member creates a strategy map to define and
outline their career goals. This is a critical step. If you
can’t define what you want, then nothing will work. Assuming
you can, you share your map with your team and they share their map
with you. The team works to define the best way to achieve the
goals within the organization or wherever it may be. Then, they
help each other reach their goals. This includes performing tasks,
influencing people, training each other or acting as a coach or
mentor.
This approach is beneficial in that your team members help you
correct a lot of your mis-perceptions on the things that are
holding you back. Having multiple perspectives on events is a much
better way to ensure you are establishing the correct meaning to
what you perceive. You have a team of people that you share your
thoughts and ideas with to obtain more clarity into the
possibilities and barriers. Hitting a barrier is not so difficult
if you have others to reinterpret what you see or if it’s
real, find a way around it. This keeps you from experiencing the
same thing over and over by trying the same things and getting the
same results. It’s also a good way to ensure the meaning
attached is positive and supports your efforts.
The biggest benefit from the team-based approach is that you can
also adjust the meanings and beliefs that others have about you.
Everyone has the ability to misinterpret what we experience. If you
are not seen as a high performer that deserves more kudos, then you
have your team design the new image and create it. Naturally, it is
a little complicated to create an image of yourself that your
actions don’t support. There must be continuity in what
people perceive. In other words, you don’t want to paint
yourself as someone you really aren’t. The positive side to
this is that you can modify what people see. Your team can create
several experiences that conflict with what the people you wish to
influence already believe. This is an effort to force them to
question it. Once they question it, you have the ability to change
its meaning by providing experiences that define it the way you
want it. Your team members play their most important role in these
situations.
In building this technique, research indicated that many
individuals failed to achieve success because managers
weren’t really looking at them. Their abilities and efforts
went unnoticed. Managers simply know very little of what their
people do. While there are many reasons for this, it’s
important to know that their beliefs about you are based on limited
information. This can be good or bad. Therefore, for those you seek
to influence in hopes of gaining favor, you must learn what they
think about you. Again, this is easily done by using your team
members.
In one organization, our friend David wanted to gain an opportunity
to lead a project. Upon hearing that a new line of business was
being entertained by management, we had David’s team interact
with the responsible managers several times in several different
situations to provide a picture of the person they wanted to lead
this project; that is, David. We mentioned his name as the best
candidate in as many situations as we could such as meetings, at
lunch, and walking to the parking lot at the end of the day. Any
situation had potential to achieve our goal of gaining visibility
for David. Now, David never said a word. All good things were
promoted by his team. A few weeks later, David was a project
manager for the first time. His team continued supporting him
through the project, especially on tasks he had difficulty with.
His experience was a huge success.
This approach not only focuses on you but also your efforts to help
your team members succeed as well. The opportunities you encounter
may not be right for you but could be for a team member. Once you
get a team member is a position of authority, it can get a little
easier to promote the efforts of the other team members. Each level
up on the rung provides more visibility and access to success. Of
course, the rules of the game change at each level but this
won’t slow you down. You’ll have several sets of eyes
that can identify the differences and have to benefit from
them.
The two biggest lessons to take from the book are that you must be
careful to ensure your perceptions aren’t hurting your
performance and you can create a much better image of yourself that
will drive you and others to make you more successful. It’s
all in your head and your team. The book, Blitz the Ladder, walks
you through building your strategy map to reaching your goals and
building your team to fuel the journey.
