When speed is not a decisive competitive advantage

I agree with Verne Harnish that speed can sometimes be a decisive competitive advantage. It has saved countless gazelles when lions are in the area.

However, as he and Dan Weston would point out, on other occasions, as this brief film clip suggests….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JIwY_WZZM4

Read Harnish’s Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and learn when — and when not — to rely on speed.

Dreams, not fantasies….

Rameshwar Singh

In a recent blog post, Seth Godin observes:

“Like a dream come true”

Choose your dreams carefully.

Everyone is entitled to a dream. It gives us hope, focuses our energy, makes us human.

Sometimes, though, we get sold a dream instead of creating our own.

Is it really every girl’s dream to become a princess, to be chosen by someone of royal birth and to have a $34 million wedding? Or is that the Disney-industrial complex betraying you, selling you short?

I just read that the folks who brought us the Mall of America are going to redo the troubled Xanadu shopping complex in New Jersey and rename it The American Dream. Is this the best we can do? Shop?

Dreams are too important to sell cheap, to give over to some organization trying to make a buck.

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To me, dreams are visions of what could be. We realize that they haven’t happened yet but some dreams are so powerful that they inspire us to make them come true. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offers the best example of such a compelling vision when he concluded his speech on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial.

As for fantasies, they resemble dreams but can cause all manner of serious problems if we delude ourselves to think that what we envision has already happened.

In anticipation of winning a state lottery, many people spend money they don’t have, to buy what they don’t need, using credit cards because they have no cash. Their fantasy is delusional.

All great human achievements began with a bold, compelling dream.

Fantasies are essentially harmless unless perceived to be realities.

The damage they can then do is incalculable. Beware.

How to Build Confidence

Amy Gallo

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Amy Gallo for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Very few people succeed in business without a degree of confidence. Yet everyone, from young people in their first real jobs to seasoned leaders in the upper ranks of organizations, have moments — or days, months, or even years — when they are unsure of their ability to tackle challenges. No one is immune to these bouts of insecurity at work, but they don’t have to hold you back.

What the Experts Say

“Confidence equals security equals positive emotion equals better performance,” says Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of
Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live. And yet he concedes that “insecurity plagues consciously or subconsciously every human being I’ve met.” Overcoming this self-doubt starts with honestly assessing your abilities (and your shortcomings) and then getting comfortable enough to capitalize on (and correct) them, adds Deborah H. Gruenfeld, the Moghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior and Co-Director of the Executive Program for Women Leaders at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Here’s how to do that and get into the virtuous cycle that Schwartz describes.

Preparation

Your piano teacher was right: practice does make perfect. “The best way to build confidence in a given area is to invest energy in it and work hard at it,” says Schwartz. Many people give up when they think they’re not good at a particular job or task, assuming the exertion is fruitless. But Schwartz argues that deliberate practice will almost always trump natural aptitude. If you are unsure about your ability to do something — speak in front of large audience, negotiate with a tough customer — start by trying out the skills in a safe setting. “Practice can be very useful, and is highly recommended because in addition to building confidence, it also tends to improve quality. Actually deliver the big presentation more than once before the due date. Do a dry run before opening a new store,” says Gruenfeld. Even people who are confident in their abilities can become more so with better preparation.

Get out of your own way

Confident people aren’t only willing to practice, they’re also willing to acknowledge that they don’t — and can’t — know everything. “It’s better to know when you need help, than not,” says Gruenfeld. “A certain degree of confidence — specifically, confidence in your ability to learn — is required to be willing to admit that you need guidance or support.”

On the flip side, don’t let modesty hold you back. People often get too wrapped up in what others will think to focus on what they have to offer, says Katie Orenstein, founder and director of The OpEd Project, a non-profit that empowers women to influence public policy by submitting opinion pieces to newspapers. “When you realize your value to others, confidence is no longer about self-promotion,” she explains. “In fact, confidence is no longer the right word. It’s about purpose.” Instead of agonizing about what others might think of you or your work, concentrate on the unique perspective you bring.

Get feedback when you need it

While you don’t what to completely rely on others’ opinions to boost your ego, validation can also be very effective in building confidence. Gruenfeld suggests asking someone who cares about your development as well as the quality of your performance to tell you what she thinks. Be sure to pick people whose feedback will be entirely truthful; Gruenfeld notes that when performance appraisals are only positive, we stop trusting them. And then use any genuinely positive commentary you get as a talisman.

Also remember that some people need more support than others, so don’t be shy about asking for it. “The White House Project finds, for example, that many women need to be told they should run for office before deciding to do so. Men do not show this pattern of needing others’ validation or encouragement,” says Gruenfeld. It’s okay if you need praise.

Take risks

Playing to your strengths is a smart tactic but not if it means you hesitate to take on new challenges. Many people don’t know what they are capable of until they are truly tested “Try things you don’t think you can do. Failure can be very useful for building confidence,” says Gruenfeld. Of course, this is often easier said than done. “It feels bad to not be good at something. There’s a leap of faith with getting better at anything,” says Schwartz. But don’t assume you should feel good all the time. In fact, stressing yourself is the only way to grow. Enlisting help from others can make this easier. Gruenfeld recommends asking supervisors to let you experiment with new initiatives or skills when the stakes are relatively low and then to support you as you tackle those challenges.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Be honest with yourself about what you know and what you still need to learn
Practice doing the things you are unsure about
Embrace new opportunities to prove you can do difficult things

Don’t:

Focus excessively on whether you or not you have the ability – think instead about the value you provide
Hesitate to ask for external validation if you need it
Worry about what others think — focus on yourself, not a theoretical and judgmental audience

[To read the complete article, including two especially informative case studies, please click here.]

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Amy Gallo is a writer and editor. Her work appears on HarvardBusiness.org. For eight years, she worked for the management consulting firm Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Company). At Katzenbach, she authored the firm’s report on the Informal Organization, featured in Fortune magazine.

Alan M. Webber: An interview by Bob Morris

Alan M. Webber

Alan M. Webber is an award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist. In 1995, he launched Fast Company magazine, a fresh, dynamic entry in the business magazine category. Headquartered in Boston, MA, the magazine became the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history. Fast Company won two national magazine awards—one for general excellence, one for design—and Webber was named Adweek’s “Editor of the Year ” in 1999, along with co-founding editor William Taylor. Most recently, he wrote Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self. He has also been active at local, state, and national political levels, serving as policy advisor for the mayor of Portland, Oregon, writing speeches for several governors, and working as special assistant to the United States Secretary of Transportation.

Morris: Before discussing Rules of Thumb, a few general questions. First, when and why did you decide to pursue a career in journalism?

Webber: I’ve always been interested in reporting, writing, and the purposes that good journalism can serve. When I was in high school, I was editor of the high school newspaper, and we wrote editorials calling for our school (a private all-boy’s–and at the time all-white–prep school) to integrate, to accept black students. In college I became the chairman of our college newspaper. This was during the Vietnam War, and we used the newspaper to cover student attitudes to that war, but also to explore the issues on campus that went more deeply into the purposes of a liberal arts education. So I’ve always seen journalism and activism as closely linked.

Morris: Since then, what do you think have been the most significant changes i magazine publication that includes both HBR and Fast Company?

Webber: The world of publishing, in general, has been changing dramatically for the last decade or more. It’s not just the web–although the web has served to disrupt the traditional business model of publishing. It’s also reading habits of different generations, attitudes toward the media and other large institutions, and the overall pace of change that people have to contend with in their daily lives. Obviously, HBR enjoys a privileged position in the magazine world, by virtue of its relationship with the Harvard Business School. The issue there is less one of economic survival, and more of relevance and impact with a business community that will always respect the HBR brand. But will the HBR brand be in touch with and in synch with the changing concerns and composition of the business community? Fast Company, because of its unique DNA as a business magazine devoted to the them of change and innovation, should be relevant forever! But it has to face the changing economic demands of publishing.

At the moment, I’m happy to say, both magazines seem to be meeting their respective challenges head-on.

Morris: Back to HBR, for a moment. What are your fondest memories of that association?

Webber: It’s always the people. When I took over as managing editor under Ted Levitt, we went about the work of re-inventing HBR. Ted was a brilliant marketer, mentor, and writer, so he provided the leadership and the vision to guide us. Then we recruited an almost entirely new team of people to re-invigorate HBR, to re-design the look and feel of the publication, to re-engineer the architecture, the structure of each issue, to bring in new ideas for presenting business thinking to the audience. For quite a few years, we had a terrific team that was excited about creating a new conversation about the direction that business was headed in. In many respects, I think those days helped foster an innovative culture at HBR and re-connected the publication with the larger business audience that was eager to be part of a fresh dialog about how business was changing, how the world was changing, and how the pieces fit together.

Morris: Please explain the process by which you and Bill Taylor co-founded Fast Company in November, 1995.

Webber: Bill and I met at HBR; I was the managing editor and he was the most talented, brilliant, energetic editor on the staff. We began exploring the idea for a new business magazine some time after I got back from a 3-month trip to Japan in 1989-90, where I was exposed to a set of powerful forces that were transforming the world of work. Some of the things I saw could be integrated into HBR, but because of the institutional limits of HBR, some were simply outside the legitimate boundaries of the publication at that time. So in the early 1990s Bill and I started talking informally about what a new magazine could be like. Bill left HBR first, and then when I left around 1993, we got serious about what a new magazine would be like: what it would look like, how it would perform as an editorial product, what we could create that would be exciting and useful, and speak to the dramatic changes going on in business: globalization, technology, the new opportunities for individuals to make a difference in work and through their work. We raised about $550,000 from a fantastic group of first round investors, and in 1993 we put out a “beta” issue. From the feedback we got from that issue, we wrote up a second-round business plan and then showed our work to different publishing companies, looking for a business partner with whom to launch Fast Company for real. Finally we were fortunate to make a deal with Mort Zuckerman and Fred Drasner, who owned U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic Monthly at that time. The Atlantic was in Boston, where Bill and both lived, so to launch Fast Company we borrowed office space from The Atlantic and ad sales and business staff from U.S. News, making our launch very economical. We hired a small, dedicated staff to put together our first issues, and the first “real” issue of Fast Company came out in 1995. The rest, as they say, is history!

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Alan Webber invites you to check out these websites:

http://www.rulesofthumbbook.com/about_the_author.html

http://rulesofthumbbook.blogspot.com/

Why only long-term, high-impact books become business “classics”

My favorite library at Yale

We seem to live in an age of instant gratification during which the average attention span resembles a strobe light blink and most people are only interested in (often obsessed with) the latest, “the best,” what’s new, the biggest, the fastest, what “they” recommend, etc.

I think it says something about populist values that Charlie Sheen can attract a crowd of 20,000 but Norman Borlaug couldn’t and that the claim to fame of most celebrities today is, well, their claim to fame.

It was a 12^th century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, Bernard of Chartres, not Isaac Newton, who once observed, “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Authors of today’s business bestsellers crowd together atop the shoulders of those who wrote “classics,” the secular books almost unanimously agreed upon as having had the greatest influence on business thinking. They are listed in order of publication. Few of these were bestsellers when published, most continue to sell in revised/updated editions, and all offer original insights, brilliantly explained.

The Art of War (c. 2500 BC), Sun Tzu
On War (1816-1830), Carl von Clauswitz
Creative Experience (1924), Mary Parker Fowlett
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter
Concept of the Corporation (1946) or The Effective Executive (1967), Peter Drucker
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn
The Servant As Leader (1970), Robert Greenleaf
In Search of Excellence (1982), Thomas Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence (1985), Wayne Payne
The Fifth Discipline (1990), Peter Senge

There are others also worthy of inclusion.

Which ones? Ask the authors of today’s business bestsellers.

Make Your Competition Work for You

Martin Zwilling

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Martin Zwilling for the Harvard Business Review blog series, “The Conversation.” To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Companies today are paranoid, afraid that even their allies will steal their business. Yet a creative collaboration with your biggest competitor may be the best opportunity for revenue and survival. But remember that dancing with the wolves can also get you eaten for lunch. You have to take the risk but keep your wits about you.

Your goal is coopetition: to find a way to partner with your competitor in such a way that both parties can substantially benefit from the other’s resources — without stealing customers or damaging anyone’s credibility. It’s a great survival strategy for small companies or entrepreneurs, and a good expansion strategy for even the largest companies.

As an example, a few years ago I worked for small software company selling an expensive enterprise workflow product. It was heavy on visual development capability but light on modeling and simulation, and we kept battling a competitor in the marketplace who had essentially the inverse strengths in a similar product. We were both losing in the lucrative high-end market segment. Neither could afford to build what the other had, but we could easily integrate some of our combined features in a shared product.

We finally decided set up a strategic partnership with a joint product to capture this elusive segment of the market. As a result of our increased coverage and wider range of solutions, we both gained revenue and credibility, while reducing marketing and development. In the following quarter, we jointly signed up two new customers who loved our integrated solution.

This example is only the first of six approaches for coopetition, with potential wins for both sides: Best of both creates a new market. Your competitor has strengths, and you have different strengths. A strategic combination can win in a new segment of the market, which neither of you could do alone in the same time frame or at the same cost.

[Here are the first three approaches. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. Cost sharing and economies of scale. Companies work together on segments of their business where they believe they can minimize costs but not jeopardize their unique attributes. For instance, Dell and HP are both strong competitors on notebook computers, but they offer Intel processors, rather than building their own, to keep component costs down and broaden their application market through compatibility. Both now lead with the same processors, but Dell offers custom system configuration at ship, while HP capitalizes on more impressive display and battery technology.

2. Upsell related products after the initial sale. If your customers would benefit by having both of your products, you might negotiate the opportunity to include your competitor’s product as a later add-on, or vice versa. This is called up-selling, or cross-up-selling, and both parties share the profits. You see this every day in retail outlets that are not company stores. They are more than happy to sell you alternate brand of shoes that match your suit, or suggest a premium appliance from another manufacturer, once you have selected the lowest cost refrigerator.

3. Integrate for new or critical mass. If your competitor has a similar product that could complement your own, you might consider arranging a deal where both you and your competitor would offer an integrated bundle or new product. Another way to coopetate is to create a critical new offering to address a common enemy. For example, if you’re selling a travel magazine, you could add a free travel video when someone buys a subscription. You’re now targeting people who want the travel magazine and those that want the specific video you are giving away. Others will now buy your travel magazine over a travel book, for example, which competes with both your magazine and the video individually.

*     *     *

While it is normal to instinctively look for ways to avoid, evade or protect ourselves from the perceived threat of a competitor, take the time to look at the opportunity strategic alliances may provide. You will find that it is sometimes smarter to capitalize on the positive aspects of a competitive situation, rather than fight to the death of both of you.

*     *     *

Martin Zwilling is the founder and chief executive officer of Startup Professionals. CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Callaman Ventures Board Member and Executive in Residence; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; Arizona Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management. See me on Twitter as StartupPro, and on LinkedIn and Facebook by name. Published in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Business Insider.

You are cordially invited to check out his daily blog or contact him directly.

PopCap Founder John Vechey: The Most Important Quality for Your First Employees

Here is an excerpt from article written by Donna Fenn for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

*     *     *

John Vechey

John Vechey launched PopCap in 2000 with co-founders Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka. Since then, the Seattle-based company has taken the casual games market by storm, selling more than 50 million of its most popular game, Bejeweled, and posting more than $100 million in revenue.

“I think everyone, when they’re hiring their first employees, is looking for intelligence,competency, and experience. You want to hire great people. But there’s another trait that I’ve come to appreciate in early employees. When I look back at our first 20 hires, the ones who are much more valuable now are the ones who also have the ability to be pretty dynamic.

The hardest part of a startup is that it will evolve. To be successful, regardless of how you started out, your core values must stay the same but the company itself is going to change a lot. You have management changes, you mature in how you think about the business, you have to invest in new types of business, and walk away from old things. And so when you interview those first employees, you have to ask yourself, are these people really going to be able to evolve as the company evolves? Are they going to be able to handle the unknown, and the ambiguities? Are they going to be able to think about the world one way now, and in five years have the ability to think about it a different way and accept that, and embrace it?”

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Donna Fenn

Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success and Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack. She has more than twenty years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends as a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, an expert on Business.com, and a featured expert on SBTV.com. From 1988 to 1992, she lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was a correspondent for The Associated Press and covered business, culture, the economy, and the Gulf War.

She invites you to visit her website: UpstartsRock.com and to follow her on Twitter: @donnafenn.

How Stress Can Improve Your Performance

Justin Menkes

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Justin Menkes for the Harvard Business Review series, “The Conversation.” To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Recently, I read an article in which a developmental psychologist cited a mountain of evidence showing that IQ was one of the most significant predictors of emotional resiliency in children. The same pattern has also long been seen in the military, where it has been conclusively shown that higher-IQ soldiers show fewer signs of long-term post-traumatic stress.

Why would cognitive ability predict emotional hardiness? In truth, it doesn’t. But the tests that measure cognitive ability do. When you tell people they have 12 minutes to show whether they are smart or dumb, the ability to stay calm and focused under duress has a huge impact on the scores.

Heightened anxiety has long been shown to dramatically impair people’s ability to think. It affects basic functions such as short-term memory and processing of simple information, as well as more complex thinking, where anxiety can aggressively interfere with the ability to differentiate between important and irrelevant tasks. In today’s business environment of unrelenting pressure, aspiring leaders must learn how to confront heightened levels of urgency without allowing the accompanying mental agitation to be disruptive.

About six years ago, I interviewed “Ollie,” the CEO of a consumer products company. I had been hired to evaluate Ollie by his parent company because his company had been doing poorly. In fact, it was the worst-performing brand in the parent conglomerate’s portfolio. I had just presented Ollie with a hypothetical crisis that threatened the survival of his business, and was asking him to evaluate data, along with suggestions from colleagues and his board of directors, and arrive at a sound conclusion about what to do.

Just a few minutes before, when I had asked Ollie about his history with the company, he had confidently articulated the direction in which he was taking the business. Now he was struggling to offer even the most basic sense of how to proceed in a hypothetical, but very plausible, real-world crisis. When I would ask Ollie a question, he would offer an answer that was virtually incoherent. I recognized the shift in eye movements, the slight rise in room temperature, and the slight increase in human body odor. These are all the physical responses of someone experiencing an adrenaline flood that is overloading their higher-order functions. When this happens, a person is prepared to run, not think.

Anyone witnessing Ollie’s answers to my questions would shudder at the thought that this person was responsible for a company with revenues over $1 billion, but Ollie was not nearly as incompetent as he appeared during the case study portion of our evaluation. Day-to-day, on the job, he appeared fine; it was when he was confronted with a high-stress crisis that his physical response overcame his mental processes. Ollie had been promoted to the CEO role at a time when the competitive environment was changing, and he had not been prepared to handle unfamiliar complexity. He had not yet learned to tame the cognitive overload that occurs for people in response to high levels of duress.

*     *     *

Aspiring leaders must be taught how to manage their stress in such a way that it actually increases their focus and clarity. They need to gain experience in stressful situations where they get an elevated — but not overwhelming — sense of adrenaline and are set up for success. Confidence under pressure can be built like a railroad track in the brain through exposure to repeated experiences over time.

This capacity can be developed in many ways. One simple exercise involves memorizing something, be it a poem or the 50 states, and then reciting it before friends at a dinner party, while encouraging them to taunt you if you make mistakes. At first, you are more likely to have missteps in this context. Eventually, you will find that you can do the exercise faster, with more accuracy, in front of an audience than when you do it by yourself. Toastmasters

uses the same concept, teaching people to do something they often fear — public speaking — by first exposing them repeatedly to speaking in a small, supportive environment before putting them in front of larger and larger groups.

Mentors can also nurture this quality in future leaders by creating similar experiences. For instance, if your next-in-line is slated to present before the board, don’t let him do so without preparation. Have him present first in front of a few colleagues, then at the Monday morning meeting, then before the management team, all before they present in the higher-pressure environment of the boardroom.

Once an executive learns how to manage adrenaline without panic, he or she can grow confident that the sensations that stress induces will not lead to collapse. While it is a noisemaker in the untrained mind, when channeled properly adrenaline can help people accomplish things that they never would have imagined possible. The ability to make adrenaline a friend is a necessity for executives in today’s environment of ongoing duress. Not surprisingly, it’s also a hallmark of the world’s best CEOs.

*     *     *

Justin Menkes is an acclaimed author and expert in the field of C-suite talent evaluation. His latest book, Better Under Pressure, will be released by Harvard Business Review Press in May. I have read it, will soon review it, and highly recommend it as well as his earlier work, Executive Intelligence.

 

What if the Worst Happens? — What Then?

I’ve been thinking about business, preparing for the expected, and then facing the unexpected…

Many products have faced delays in delivery of products due to the earthquakes/tsunami in Japan.

And now, the tornadoes that have sliced through and devastated portions of cities, specially in Alabama…  What will that do to the economy?

(Of course, the first thought, always, is the human loss – and the tragedy of lives snuffed out, some so very young…)

But the ripple effects on the economy also get our attention.

For some reason, I go back to one of the main ideas in The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande:

We have just two reasons that we may fail. 
The first is ignorance – we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works.  There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude – because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly  This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about. 
For nearly all of history, people’s lives have been governed primarily by ignorance. 

When a company faces a problem of its own making, it is the fault of that company.  Some ineptitude has crept in, gone unchecked, and now created something between a small problem to great havoc.  In this case, the company is to blame, and the company leaders and employees have to learn, quickly and thoroughly, from their mistakes.

But when something happens from “outside” – something the company has no control over, then the company is not to blame.  A tornado; a tsunami…  these are some things no company can control.

There are a few other such examples that are equally disturbing to business success, like…  practically every business is facing the ripple effects of the rising gasoline prices.  If the prices continue to rise, then the ripple effects will be a genuine drain on a whole lot of bottom lines.  This is not the fault of the company, or its own ineptitude.  But the effects may soon be felt in every industry, in every company.

But…  on the other hand, I think there is a simple lesson in all of this.  Maybe every company needs to spend a little time on “what if the worst happens?  Then what do we do” planning.

Because I think I am learning this – there are a whole lot of “what if the worst happens” possibilities out there.

3 Tips for Surviving Difficult Conversations

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

No one is immune to workplace tensions: It is inevitable that you will have some trying conversations with colleagues or clients.

Here are three ways to reach a productive outcome, no matter how tough things get:

Keep it civil. Don’t turn the conversation into a combat with a winner and a loser. Everyone looks bad when the discussion turns toxic.

Don’t rehearse. When you know things are going to be tough, it’s tempting to practice what you’re going to say ahead of time. But this is a conversation — not a performance. Instead, know where you stand but be open enough to listen and react.

Resist making assumptions. You don’t have access to anyone’s intentions but your own. Don’t assume that you know where your counterpart is coming from or how she views the problem. Instead, ask for her perspective.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Difficult Conversations: Nine Common Mistakes” by Holly Weeks.

To see the slide show and join the discussion, please click here.