Dave Sue

​What: Take this 6 question assessment to better understand your natural thinking style.
Why: Your and your staff’s thriving at work partially depends on how naturally each fits with their work roles.

Have you ever found yourself quickly frustrated or bored with tasks that others on your team seem to thrive on? Have you considered that you might be hard-wired to perceive and organize the world a certain way, and that operating outside of that “thinking wavelength” might prevent you from bringing your best contribution to the table?

I was at a pivotal point in my life back in 2013 when I paid $2.4k to spend two days with a leadership coach who introduced me to the simple six question tool below (which I’ve put into a free 6-question online calculator here). ​Tom Peterson, described by Peter Drucker as, “the greatest process thinker in the world,” is the strategist who created the following Thinking Wavelength Assessment.

WHAT IS YOUR THRIVESPOT?

WHY UNDERSTANDING YOUR THINKING WAVELENGTH MATTERS

Tom believes people cannot change their thinking wavelength, regardless of the amount of training they receive. If this is true, it is best to position yourselves for jobs that align with your natural thinking wavelength range.

What happens when we operate outside our natural wavelength? We experience stress and internal discomfort, and easily become frustrated or bored (e.g., a natural abstract thinker working a job where she continually deals with a lot of details). This leads to both lower external performance and internal satisfaction.

OVERVIEW OF THE FIVE THINKING WAVELENGTHS

To help you understand a little more about the way you think, here are some descriptions about the five different Thinking Wavelengths from Tom’s book The Life You Were Meant to Live.

• Grinders – Grinders get the work done. They are detail-minded doers.
• Minders – Minders can manage a unit team, having both the people skills and the organizational abilities to do so. They can supervise the performance of work and are likely to function best in frontline supervision. They have an ability to conduct diagnoses and to problem solve.
• Keepers – Keepers are capable of managing the entire organization. They appreciate the strategic and the administrative. They may have both concrete and abstract thinking skills, but will be biased to administrative/operational work.
• Finders – Finders are entrepreneurs. They open up new territories, close important new accounts, reclaim key lost accounts, or transfer new applications into new areas. Finders are abstract thinkers, and often do not complete the paperwork that most concrete thinkers require.
• Conceivers – Conceivers are bright, articulate, and persuasive, but are challenged with execution. They are best suited for roles in universities, seminaries and pure research laboratories. Conceivers often struggle to manage others well, and their ideas rarely become commercialized.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Here are two ideas to get you started.

1. Use this new self-awareness to reflect on how to best position yourself in your company, what role to aim for in the future, and what type of people you need to surround yourself with to be successful.
2. Grow your others-awareness so that you leverage your team’s strengths, and even hire people who are most naturally suited for new roles.

Although you might be helped as I was by working with a coach who can leverage this tool as part of a larger portfolio of self-leadership exercises, I think this tool can be helpful simply for self-reflection so I’ve shared it above.

CLOSING QUOTE FROM TOM PETERSON

​As Tom puts it in his book, “If your thinking wavelength and your current job description do not match up, start planning for a change in job. You can change your job. You can’t change the way you think.”
​
If we at Small Business Lift can help you or your executive team LIFT your business over a specific challenge you’re facing, contact us today to set up a complimentary initial exploratory conversation.

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Handle Organization & Small Business Stress With Covey’s 3 Circles

What: Reframe Stressful Small Business Situations through the Circles of Concern, Influence, and Control.
Why: You will be reenergized, see things more clearly, and move forwards aligned with reality.

​Have you ever looked up how diamonds are formed? Pure carbon atoms have to undergo the duress of approximately 725,000 pounds per square inch (vs the 15 psi we normally experience in the air), and at temperatures of 2000 – 2200 degrees Fahrenheit (which is 2x as hot as the sun).

As you are (or have or will be) feeling intense stress and heat, here’s a quick exercise introducing Covey’s three circles to help you become a diamond, to not only endure but be powerfully transformed through this pressure and heat.

Exercise:

First, divide everything in your mind into one of two categories – it is either something you’re concerned about or are not concerned about. Everything you’re concerned about (e.g., health of your business during a global crisis) falls in your Circle of Concern and whatever you’re not concerned about (e.g., health of a random country’s economy) falls outside it.

Second, divide everything in your Circle of Concern into one of two categories – either something you can personally directly influence or you can’t. This is the trickiest part of this exercise because there are a lot of things you’re concerned about that you actually cannot  in any relevant timeframe personally impact (e.g., change the price of oil, whether the federal government unveils another financial bailout package, etc.). Everything you can impact falls into your Circle of Influence.

Third, divide everything in your Circle of Influence into two last subcategories – either something involving only your own behavior or not. Anything involving anyone other than yourself falls outside this last, third circle, the Circle of Control, because the only thing any of us have any degree of absolute and direct control over is our own behavior.

Assessment:

So how can this help you become a diamond rather simply crack under the stress and duration you’re experiencing? 

Take the following two question self-assessment to see.

1. What concerns do you focus most of your time and energies on? Which circle do they fall in?
2. Which of your circles is growing?

​Recognize that you are giving power to whatever you give yourself to.

Investing in anything outside your Circle of Influence gives negative energy to that Circle of Concern and shrinks your Circle of Influence. Focusing and acting on the issues within your Circle of Influence or Circle of Control ignites positive energy within and allows you to push those borders outwards, so you can influence more and more areas of your life.

Next Steps:

Reading or listening to Covey’s 7 Habits to understand his full personal transformation framework would be a worthwhile investment for sure.

To give you a quick ROI today, here’s the short answer.

1. Circle of Control: Work on your habits to solve your own behavioral concerns.
2. Circle of Influence: Learn and use different methods of influence to solve these concerns.
3. Circle of Concern: Learn to live with these concerns even though you don’t like them, but do so staying focused on controlling your response to those concerns.

​In some ways, the above next steps are captured in the serenity prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous. “Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can be and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Just as diamonds are a valued and rare commodity, so great character driven leadership is also only formed under great stress and pressure and is also a rare and precious commodity today.

​Now that you’ve experienced Covey’s three circle analysis, on what circle are you going to focus your time and energies? Our hope is you will choose to be transformed into a diamond, knowing that the greater the stress and pressure the more solid and valuable your character driven leadership will be.

What: Understand the various leadership development stages.
Why: You will know what is most critical to focus on during each stage of your leadership journey, in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.

The Making of a Leader: Recognizing the Lessons and Stages of Leadership Development, by Robert Clinton (First published in 1989).

Our recommendation:
After reading his book back in the 1990s, we had to go to California to meet Dr. Clinton in person, and he is as gracious in person as his book is useful. Although written from a Christian faith perspective (with the belief that God loves and is working in the life of every person), Clinton lays out a basic character-skills-network development framework that all students of leadership will find helpful.

​His exuberance to be precise has led to a bit of an excessive creation of new terms but the basic leadership development framework he lays out makes the read well worthwhile.

​From Amazon.com:
After examining the lives of hundreds of historical, biblical, and contemporary leaders, Dr. J. Robert Clinton gained perspective on how leaders develop over a lifetime. By studying the six distinct stages he identifies, you will learn to:

• Recognize and respond to God’s providential shaping in your life
• Determine where you are in the leadership development process
• Identify others with leadership characteristics
• Direct the development of future leaders

Purchase from Amazon here.