“Bringing the Thunder”

I am a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy….just love the show. My friends point out the medical misses, but I love the show for its strong women characters who are smart, competitive, and just cool.

One episode which made me laugh was when the new heart surgeon Maggie tells the younger intern that she needs to know when to “bring the thunder” because she’s young and pretty. Basically, how to stand up for yourself and make the argument.

This is when you’re going to lose it a little because you believe in your heart and soul you are right. When every cell is telling you that someone is making the wrong decision. You’re going to bring the thunder.

Now, you can’t bring the thunder all the time. But if you never bring the thunder, what does that say about you?

 

Quotes I Love- “Winning solves a lot of problems”

Remember Jeremy Lin? Back in 2014, he made everyone sit up and take notice as the first American-Taiwanese player for the NBA, and he played for the NY Knicks.

Watch his incredible tiebreaking 3 pointer with less than a second to go.

His coach said: “You just watch and you’re in awe. He held it until five tenths of a second left. He was pretty confident that ball was going in, no rebounds , no nothing.”

But what he said, which I loved was “When you win, that solves a lot of problems.”

That’s true at work too. I recently presented to a group of folks who were struggling: they were relatively new, they were getting projects dumped on them, they felt people didn’t understand their value proposition.  The advice I gave them was: “Define what it means to win, and then go after it.”

Defining winning is the most important thing you can do as a leader. People want a win that’s authentic. No one is motivated by the “everyone gets a trophy” approach. Wain Kellum, CEO of Vocalocity has a great quote…”true happiness, especially in a work sense, comes from earned achievement.”

Winning is the best morale booster and retainer of talent around. Make sure you know what it means to win.

How to Say No to Someone who Wants To Hire You

I spoke to someone today who had been approached by someone she had previously worked for about a job.  She felt conflicted because she’d only be in her job for 4 months…things were crazy, and they really needed her. Plus, she really liked who she worked with. But it sounded great.  Here was my advice:

1. You can always have a conversation, but you really need to love the new role and the new people….because there’s a chance you won’t be able to come back. People don’t usually want to hold people back, but if you’re leaving them in a lurch, they won’t want to be played twice.

2. As you progress in your career, what you say no to because more important than ever. When you’re just starting out, there are no real bad moves-you’re learning and adding to your skill set. As you get more senior, you have more to lose, so really think about it and don’t be afraid to say no. (“I’m really flattered, but I don’t think it’s the right move for me now” is one way.

3. Live with the decision for the day. You need to get past the adrenaline rush of someone wanting to hire you, the allure of something new and sparkly, and temptation of escaping whatever is driving you crazy right now. Once that clears, you should have a good sense of whether or not it’s right for you.

Improving on Performance

This is an interesting article called “Beware the Winning Streak”.  Essentially, it points out the obvious, which is that it gets harder and harder to improve performance the better your performance is.  As one of my people used to tell me… “Happiness is a low base.”

I see this concept come up often: it’s usually the reason why you don’t aim for 100% targets on your performance standards. If you’re at 90%, it gets very expensive and much more difficult to chase down the final 10% to hit 100%.

For people, I think you can keep striving to get it right. But you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re not perfect. Some things don’t matter as much as others.  Some things have to be 100% (responses to 911 calls for example). But not everything. Just make sure you pick the right things.