Control what you can control
What Would Dale Do? is a newsletter about human behavior.
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”1
At the end of the day, so much outside your control can influence the outcome of your actions and best intentions. In the same way that no one’s perfect, nothing works perfectly (ever). So, my advice? Don’t expect it to (ever). Instead, concentrate your energy on controlling what you can control.
This practice is both quantitative (hit your numbers) and qualitative (execute with quality). Early in my career, I saw this as a binary: index toward detail or index toward speed. And, in my first recruiting job, I realized that I was great at finding uniquely specialized candidates for roles, and that my way to stand out was by unearthing exactly, precisely the profile my client wanted to hire.
One day, my boss was droning on about the importance of calling lots of candidates every day. “Volume, volume, volume.” I pushed back and said, “It’s more about quality and finding the right people, than it is about finding lots of people.”
His rebuttal was a swift knockout: “It’s both.”
He was right, and I knew it: indexing on finding a narrow few prospects would naturally limit my chances of success. The lesson was, I could control both – high quality and high quantity would maximize my chances at making the hire.
This next section is focused entirely on the what(s) you can control.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll address:
Scale back your orientation
Yes and friends
Start with where you agree
Stay curious
and more!
Within this section you’ll have the opportunity to level-up your Dale Carnegie superfanship and support WWDD by joining Insiders. Premium subscribers will get access to exclusive content, and sessions where we workshop real-life scenarios that have been making you wonder: What Would Dale Do?
“Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”2
Chapter 2.1 - Scale back your self orientation
“I have discovered from personal experience that one can win the attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them.”3
Have you ever used a real camera? (Not your phone!) Like, one of those cameras with a manual lens. If you haven’t, can you imagine what it looks like?
OK. Now, pretend that you are looking at your plate of work through one of those cameras. Are you with me?
Most of us (because of society’s tendency toward right-handed individuals) will see themselves, in their mind’s eye, holding the camera with their right hand, index finger gracefully poised over the capture button; left hand torqued, a few fingers on the lens, ready to “zoom in” or “zoom out” to get the right shot.
If it were a plate of food, you could imagine zooming way in to see individual shreds of parmesan, or out to see the full composition of your dinner.
The bigger your job grows, the more you’ll have to context switch: not just from task-to-task, but from the granular to the strategic across increasingly broader terrain. Your ability to zoom will inform your capacity to do this well.
Let’s start with zooming in: this is checking the details, the scripts, the automation; this is confirming the specific numbers, the source code, or the details of the logistics. In order to scale, we condense or abstract (via layering or automation) certain parts of our job to enable them to move faster, and when you “zoom in” you are making the deliberate effort to look at those parts more closely. Andy Grove of Intel has some excellent tips on the how/when/why of zooming-in in his book High Output Management.4
So, what about zooming out? Zooming out means seeking perspective beyond your purview. It means getting out of the details of the garlic bread (difficult, I know), and even beyond the meat and potatoes of your dinner, and endeavoring to see the entire buffet spread! It means, instead of honing in on the minutiae of your own work, you take the perspective to examine how your body of work fits into the broader context.
“Why is this necessary?” you might ask. It helps you know that you’re solving the right problem. It helps you make the optimal adjustments. It can help bolster the “what you should be doing,” with a “why.” Especially when there’s a matter of change.
At work, we all have jobs to do. These jobs are prepared as “duties and responsibilities” that are defined at a point in time, materialize in your day-to-day, and generally evolve as you settle in. At some point, the person in the role has a keener sense of the jobs to be done than the person setting the requirements. And, while you can’t always control how you’re overseen, or by whom, you can control whether or not you zoom out. Finding a broader perspective of your job will allow you to position yourself to modify both what you do and how you do it.
By definition, we often lack context and visibility on things beyond our purview. Yes, totally. AND ALSO, you can still do the zooming, and it will still serve you.
An unexpected ally in this endeavor is your company’s org chart (the hierarchical representation of organizational structure). Imagine your company org chart is blown up and projected on the sidelines of a football field, and a little bird was flying around the field and landed right on the org chart - squarely on your name. From that position, what can the bird see of the field? Are you brand new to the workforce, and your name is wedged into the grass on the sidelines? Are you in middle-management, and part way up? Perhaps you can see one end zone really well, but not much beyond midfield. What if the bird flew up to your boss’ name, or your boss’ boss’ name? What else could it see from that vantage?
Tying back to work: from that place in the org chart, what is that person solving for? You can also try this exercise cross-functionally.
Back to the camera metaphor: whether you turn your wrist to focus the lens, whether you leverage the zoom, that is within your control. Choosing to zoom means actioning on the willingness and awareness to move beyond your own viewpoint, which expands your problem-solving capabilities. By focusing less on yourself and your personal perspective, you’re lowering your self-orientation which, in turn, enables you to maximize your impact.
Want more on this topic? As our first addition to the Insider’s library (live on Thursday!) we’ll delve into the “Trust Equation” where self-orientation is the denominator. See you there!
In the meantime, when it comes to perspective-taking: WWYD? Share in the comments!
Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr
HTWFAIP, pg. 67
HTWFAIP, pg. 142
https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884