Leadership Gold Part 4 of 10: Working Within Your Strength Zone
February 19, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
Too many times we spend our energies trying to improve our weaknesses, which may be a good thing, but what are our true strengths? It is best to spend most of your time improving your strengths and making sure that you are better at it than anyone else. What are your strengths? What are your talents?
Maxwell argues that people do not pay for mediocrity. They only pay for excellence. Only excellence survives and flourishes. A leader works within his strength zone and gets to the core of what makes him special. People will follow someone who thrives in his strength zone, but people will not follow someone who exemplifies only mediocrity.
An audience member challenged Maxwell and said, “I think Tiger Woods proves an exception to your rule. He always works on the weaknesses in his swing.” Maxwell countered, “Au contraire, Tiger Woods is working on a weakness in his strength zone, which is golf. If he were trying to practice accounting or gardening, that would be working on weaknesses outside of his strength zone.” Maxwell goes on to say that no matter how many hours of golf that he played he would never come close to Tiger Woods. So he works within his strength zone, which is leadership and communication.
A great leader not only knows his own strength zone but he knows the strength zones of every member of his team. He knows how to cultivate the strength zones of each team member and how to avoid any weaknesses that each team member inherently possesses. In the past, I have referred to this as a staff member’s “scorecard”. I know each person’s scorecard. When a leader develops his own strength zone, he can more readily recognize the strength zones of those around him. In addition, he hires people whose strength zones are different from his own to complement rather than repeat his own strength zone.
How do you know your strength zone? It would help to get feedback from those around you. Perhaps you think you are good at something, but that is not the consensus out there. You must marry your passion with your talents. You can’t just have one or the other. Passion without talent will not lead to success. Talent without passion won’t get you very far. Once you have found your strength zone, work on developing it in every facet that you can…all the time…relentlessly. That is what I do with facial plastic surgery and with leadership/self growth. Those are my strength zones and I work tirelessly within them. I work harder than most if not all of my colleagues, and I work more creatively. I live, breathe, eat, and sleep it. Do you know your strength zone and are you relentless in your pursuit at getting your strength zone better?
Leadership Gold Part 2 of 10: Leading Yourself
February 17, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
Most oftentimes a leader is focused on leading other people without truly realizing that the most important person to lead and also the most difficult is himself or herself. The reason that I write these blogs is as an exercise to get myself better as a leader. They are life lessons for me first. If I cannot lead myself, I will have no followers following me.
Most oftentimes, we do not work at self-improvement but look at everyone around us as needing work. Maxwell says that when we criticize someone else, that is called constructive criticism. However, when someone criticizes us we call that destructive criticism. I am certainly not perfect at taking criticism, but I am a lot better today than I was even last year and last year I was better than the year prior. Remember from the 4 agreements, “never to take anything personally”. That is very important in this case. Too often when we judge others, we judge them by THEIR actions, whereas when we judge ourselves we judge ourselves by our intentions. This two-tier system of criticism leads us to failure because we never meant anything by what we did or so we rationalize, but that person certainly should have known better. We must strive to create a harmonious congruity by how we perceive ourselves and others.
Maxwell, a former preacher, still says that he ultimately does not trust himself to lead himself. That is why he has established external accountability for his actions. That is why I wrote about accountability a couple of weeks ago and why I emphasized how I am accountable to other business leaders/owners in my EO forum group. How have you made yourself accountable? To whom? What interval?
We as leaders (and that means all of you too!) must hold ourselves to a higher level of accountability. Linda, who is my spa director, asked me last year why I have apologized to my staff for seemingly small infractions, and I explained that as a leader I hold myself to a higher level of accountability of who I am and who I should aim to be. There is no other person that can truly hold you to that level of accountability than yourself.
When we first lead ourselves, we can then have a chance at leading others around us. I have learned a lot about real-life leadership this past year and have worked even more diligently at becoming a more centered leader. By virtue of that, my patients and my staff and everyone around me has benefited. I must start with myself. You must start with yourself. We must start with ourselves. I look at my readership as part of my extended team at LFP because I would love for all of us to grow as humans in our common fraternity.
Buy•ology Part 2 of 5: Smoking, NASCAR, & Subliminal Messages
February 10, 2009 by dr. lam · 12 Comments
How effective are the anti-smoking campaigns we see? The answer that Lindstrom argues in Buy•ology is not very. He actually found that smokers craved more smoking when they were shown an advertisement in which a group of smokers were engaged in the activity of smoking but instead of smoke, caterpillar-sized wads of fat emanated from the end of the cigarette as representing the artery-clogging effect that smoking can have on the body over time. He found that the smokers were more focused on the convivial atmosphere that the smokers were sharing rather than the absurd and sickening effusion of fat wads that was the more obvious element in the commercial. In fact, he found using fMRI that smokers shown advertisements without a warning were less inclined to smoke than those who were shown the anti-smoking warning. The effect of the written ban that accompanied an advertisement served to elicit the craving center in our brains, the nucleus accumbens, which is very fascinating to me.
However, interstingly, he found that the only thing that tended to make the smokers want to smoke more was the absence of any reference to smoking, whether bad or good. He found that when images featured Marlboro-red Ferraris and camels riding into the sunset or other cues that have been linked as images with smoking brands, that the craving center would light up even more. Reportedly, NASCAR generates one of the most fiercely brand-loyal fans of any out there. He found that when smokers watched Marlboro-red jumpsuited men who did not have any explicit logos celebrating the company, the smokers responded even more fervently in their brain’s craving center for smoking even more so than when watching the anti-smoking commercials and certainly more than your average smoking commercial in the past, free of such bans. The thought is that this kind of subliminal advertising lowered the guard that a smoker might have regarding the commercial aspect of an advertisement and instead only stimulated them to make all the wonderful mental associations that NASCAR represented: danger, masculinity, excitement, speed, and competition.
In a Harvard University study, the author reports that a group of seniors improved their walking gait when they were exposed to positive stereotypes of the elderly including such words as wise, astute, and accomplished as opposed to those who were fed the opposite words senile, diseased, and debilitated. The effect that these seemingly sublimal advertisements can have on us is strikingly powerful and covert. It is important that when we as consumers evaluate our purchases before we purchase that we evaluate how much a component is our subliminal brains influencing us.
During consultations with me, I actually engage your logical brain to override the emotional component of a buying choice with me. I know that my before and after photographs can elicit a favorable response from you, which is perhaps one of the most important reasons that you choose me as a surgeon. However, I told a patient on Friday that if you do not think I am the best surgeon to do your work I don’t want you as a patient. I also explicitly said that I also want for you to know why that is the case in great and exquisite detail. I am a very focused and elaborate educator and take pride in making you an educated consumer and overcoming irrational emotional responses that might cloud your ability to understand what I have to offer. I go the extra mile in education because I do not want you to choose me based on emotion but based on intelligently infused education. That is what this website endeavors to do and that is what I attempt to do every day in my practice.
Buy•ology Part 1 of 5: Mirror Neurons
February 9, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
I was fascinated by Martin Lindstrom’s book Buy•ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, which focuses on how consumers make their buying choices based on a field known as neuromarketing. Neuromarketing employs a variety of techniques to explore how and why consumers make their purchases based on sophisticated brain scans and other methods to detect how our fallible human brains function. I enjoyed another book on behavioral economics better, Predictably Irrational, which I discussed in a series of blogs several weeks ago. I would like to thank Gary, my hair transplant patient, who recommended both books to me and who also confessed was an avid reader of these blogs, so thanks Gary for encouraging me to read Lindstrom’s book. I actually read another of his books many years ago called Brand Sense, which was equally as insightful. I would welcome comment/feedback and ideas for future blogs from any of my readership.
The field of behavioral economics/neuromarketing is fascinating to me. I think by laying out the way that we think we can see our own irrational behavior so that when we make purchasing decisions we can do so perhaps more rationally and avoid the pitfalls of being all too human. Today’s discussion will be on mirror neurons.
In 1992 an Italian researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the gestural behaviors of a species of monkey known as the macaque. He was specifically exploring a part of the brain known as the premotor area and how the monkeys behaved when performing certain gestures. What he found was that the monkeys would have their premotor area light up not only when they carried out the assigned task but when they watched another monkey doing the same. Interestingly, one day when a grad student returned from lunch break and was about to lick an ice cream cone, the same center of the brain lit up longingly. Only certain targeted gestures would elicit this neural response, whereas most observed activities would not. Rizzolatti termed these specific regions of the brain that were involved as “mirror neurons”, which are located in the inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe.
When we watch a baseball game and we observe our team lose, we cringe. When we read the words “fingernails crossing a chalkboard”, we can hear and feel it. When we see someone smile, we tend to do the same. In a study in 2008 using functional MRI (fMRI) by Takashi Tsukuira and Roberto Cabeza, they found that when subjects looked at a smiling face, they would more readily remember that individual’s name. Being sensitive to positive social signals, we tend to remember those individuals better. We have a tendency to mirror those around us that we like or that we see on a frequent basis. In fact, a certain chemical signal comes alive when we engage our mirror neurons, specifically dopamine. Our pleasure center lights up when we mirror someone.
Particularly when we see products that we think are “cool”, our dopamine levels soar. We tend to want the iPod not only because it is cool but perhaps because we see all these shiny white ear buds surrounding us wherever we are. I certainly have a wonderful visceral response when I think of Apple products, as all of you know. It is also interesting how the book points out that what we thought was absolutely ugly and would never buy becomes something that we must have once we see it worn on every third person we encounter. I think it is fascinating to understand this example in light of how as social creatures we want to bond with those around us. I personally enjoy how my readership aims to mirror some of the thoughts and behaviors that I outline in these blogs, and I in turn enjoy responding to the positive energy that my readership imparts to me. I think mirror neurons can be a good thing so long as we are aware of the power that they possess in how we behave and think. I am certain to smile big next time I meet someone in the hope that they would remember my name better!
Lessons from EO Part 3 of 5: Conflict Resolution
February 4, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
We tend to encounter a conflict and have no idea how to manage it. As an administrator/CEO, I have to be managing conflict in small and big ways all the time. Running 4 businesses (my plastic surgery practice, the spa, the salon, and the building) forces me to deal with multiple, different personalities each of whom has a different agenda, socioeconomic/cultural/ethnic background, age, gender, motivations, position, and career objectives. In short, it compels me to understand human nature to the best of my ability so that I can exercise leadership in bringing disparate personalities and move them in the same direction. Trust me, this is not always easy or should I say it is never easy. And, I have great staff and people I work with. I can’t imagine what it is like in corporations with poor culture and unmotivated staff. Interestingly, the technique that I am about to share with you can be found in how to resolve conflicts for children in grade school and is reportedly posted on the wall in many schools according to Ellie Byrd, the trainer who taught me this technique last Friday at my EO moderator training session.
If you follow the 4 Agreements we talked about 3 weeks ago, you will remember how we should remain impeccable with our word, not to take anything personally, not to make assumptions, and to always do our best. Interestingly, almost every conflict arises from violating one of these basic tenets. A staff member may not be impeccable with his/her word, and someone else takes it personally. Or, we make an assumption over a situation and that situation actually was misconstrued based on our subjective perceptions or limited facts that we obtained.
In order to manage conflict, we have to abide by some basic steps. First, if you are the one in conflict with another person, you should confront the individual (not belligerently) and see if this entire situation arose from a miscommunication or a poor assumption. Too often, we are tempted to turn to another individual in the organization or a friend of yours to declare, “You know this person is very bad because…” when in fact we are disseminating the same gossip and hate that the other person did. In addition, we are committing another serious grievance, which is gossip not to mention perhaps making a false assumption about another.
The next level is to seek a moderator or intercessor for the current problem to see whether a third-party individual can help resolve the situation. It is important that the moderator listen to each party in the same room so that there is no bad mouthing of the other without that person being there. The moderator then uses some basic skills to separate the elements of the conflict: facts- ask the different parties to state the absolute facts of the situation; opinions- ask the different parties to share their opinion about the situation; feelings- ask the different parties to share their feelings about the situation; and wants- ask the different parties to share their wants about the situation.
If this does not rectify the situation, a group discussion should be brought to focus on team building rather than finger pointing. Using several bright minds to resolve the conflict may be better than 1 or 2. Also, it is important that the moderator constantly remain impartial and not to permit any derogatory or desultory remarks. The moderator must always create the dominant rhythm and spirit to move the discussion forward with calm and impartiality and thereby set the tone that is necessary to resolve the conflict. When working in a group, the leader should elicit responses first from the most empathic voice not the one who is going to perhaps exacerbate the situation. Choosing the first voice to speak can be important to further the tone in the right direction.
Sometimes, conflicts can be healthy when resolved. They can bring a deeper sense of clarity and help one personally grow through a problem or perceived problem. They can inspire authentic communication, release pent up rage, enhance one’s understanding of one another, help individuals improve behavioral skills such as tolerance, patience, and compassion. It can also help individuals learn techniques and strategies to solve problems. As moderator this year of my Forum, I will play a key role as a mediator during times of conflicts, which I hope will not arise with any serious frequency.