Peter Bregman: An interview by Bob Morris

Peter Bregman

Peter Bregman is the author, most recently, of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done.  He advises and consults with CEOs and their leadership teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups to nonprofits. He speaks worldwide on how people can lead, work, and live more powerfully. He is a frequent guest on public radio, provides commentary for CNN, and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Psychology Today. He is also the author of Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change.

Peter began his career teaching leadership on wilderness and mountaineering expeditions with Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School. He moved into the consulting field with the Hay Group and Accenture and, in 1998, he founded Bregman Partners, a global management consulting firm.

Peter earned his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.B.A. from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children and can be reached at www.peterbregman.com, where you can subscribe to be notified when he writes a new article.

To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing 18 Minutes, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal and professional growth? How so?

Bregman: There are so many people. I couldn’t reduce it to one person. I view life as an almost infinite number of small steps, experiences, learnings, and aha moments. Each one moves us in a certain direction. Sometimes it seems like it takes me 20 times making the same mistake before I learn to avoid it. And then I make new mistakes.  And each time, I have new teachers and people I admire who influence me and help me develop and grow.

Certainly my parents fit in the category of being important teachers. And Eleanor, my wife, has a great influence on me. Then there are friends of mine – some accomplished, like the late Dr. Alan Rosenfield who was the dean of the school of public health and a remarkable man, and some who are simply kind thoughtful intelligent people who live their lives in a way that I admire.  And then, of course, there are my children who, these days, may have the greatest influence on my growth because I feel such a need to be a better person in order to be a good Dad.

Morris: Was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.

Bregman: It was more of an experience. I went on a camping trip that was training me to lead camping trips and I fell in love with outdoor leadership. The people on the trip were generous and talented and simply good people and living in nature and leading people to work effectively with each other felt great. I just loved it. That trip set me on the course that I’m on today.

Morris: To what extent has your formal education proven invaluable to what you have accomplished thus far?

Bregman: It’s been helpful, to be sure. But it’s been one experience of many that move me – both emotionally and practically – toward my accomplishments. I loved going to school and I was fortunate enough to have terrific teachers – not just because they were talented and smart – but because they cared, we’re passionate about their subjects and about learning, and took an interest in me.  Also, my fellow students always taught me as much as my formal teachers. Learning really does happen in every moment if you are interested.

Morris: What specifically do you know now that you wish you knew when you began teaching leadership on wilderness and mountaineering expeditions with Outward Bound and then the National Outdoor Leadership School?

Bregman: Not much. I enjoy having life uncovered as I experience it. I’ve made mistakes for sure, but I don’t really regret any of them. Each of my mistakes has helped me become clear about what’s important to me and how I want to act in the future. Each mistake teaches me something. I’m pretty pleased with my decisions – good and not so good – and I’m happy with the way knowledge has unfolded for me in my life.

Morris: Opinions are divided (sometimes sharply divided) about the importance of charisma to effective leadership. What do you think?

Bregman: I believe that charisma is really important. I think people want to be inspired by their leaders. I know I do. But it can’t be all charisma – leaders need to create processes, organizations, and other leaders who can operate independently of them.

Morris: Although hardly an authority, I am a serious student of great leaders throughout history. However different they may be in most respects, all of them seem to have been great storytellers. Presumably you agree. How do you explain that?

Bregman: Great leaders engage the emotions of those around them. Great leaders help us feel passion and loyalty and courage and persistence and a million other things. Great leaders help us feel deeply. And stories are one of the best ways to help people connect to their feelings.

Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations and much of the resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” Here’s my question: How best to avoid or overcome such resistance?

Bregman: I don’t believe that people resist change. We all change, purposefully and intentionally every day. We get married, have babies, change jobs, move – and those are some of the big ones. We also change what we eat, how we travel, and places we visit on vacation.

People don’t resist change, they resist being changed. I don’t mind changing as long as it’s my choice. But I will resist when you try to change me. I don’t like to lose control.

So the way you avoid resistance to change is you don’t force it. This is what I wrote my first book about – Point B: A Short Guide to Leading A Big Change. The book includes 7 strategies for creating change without resistance. The strategies are counter-intuitive like “get the change half right.” We usually try to make change perfect but that leaves no room for people to write themselves into it.

Instead of shooting for perfect, we should be shooting for half finished and then let the people we want to buy in to the change finish it. It’s while they are perfecting the change themselves that they buy in to it.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Peter Bregman cordially invites you to check out the resources at www.peterbregman.com.

The Secret to Ensuring Follow-Through

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an especially valuable  article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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[Note: The excerpt begins mid-narrative. To read the complete article, please click here.]

As I finished my pre-offsite interviews, I made a single request of each leader: read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

A physician and writer, Gawande describes doctors who resist the checklist — it’s too simple, insulting even — and then shows us how hospital staff who follow a checklist save more lives than most medical “miracle drugs” or procedures.

Gawande makes a strong case for why experts need checklists, especially for the most mundane of tasks. The more expert we are in something, the more we take things for granted, and, as a result, miss the obvious.

Most of us think we communicate well. Which, ironically, is why we often leave out important information (we believe others already know it). Or fail to be specific about something (we think others already understand it). Or resist clarifying (we don’t want to insult other people).

Thankfully, there’s a simple solution: create a checklist and use it during every handoff.

During the offsite, the leadership team looked at where problems happened in the past and where they were likely to happen in the future. Almost all were during handoffs.

So we developed the following mandatory “handoff checklist” — questions that the person handing off work must ask the person taking accountability for delivery:

Handoff Checklist

• What do you understand the priorities to be?

• What concerns or ideas do you have that have not already been mentioned?

• What are your key next steps, and by when do you plan to accomplish them?

• What do you need from me in order to be successful?

• Are there any key contingencies we should plan for now?

• When will we next check-in on progress/issues?

• Who else needs to know our plans, and how will we communicate them?

Time it takes to go through the checklist? One to five minutes. Time (and trust) saved by going through the checklist? Immeasurable.

We came up with this checklist because it addressed the most common reasons for dropping balls in this particular organization. Your handoff checklist may be different.

Here’s what’s compelling about an established checklist: it not only reduces mistakes, it reduces the need for courage.

Why would we need courage? Imagine you just finished explaining the priorities of a project to someone. Wouldn’t it seem a little patronizing, a little insulting to their intelligence, to ask them to tell you what they understood the priorities to be?

With an established checklist, it’s no longer offensive; it’s standard. And when they answer, often with a slight misunderstanding of the priorities, you can correct them on the spot, saving them two weeks of misguided work and the loss of trust that goes along with it. That’s the power of the checklist.

A few months after the offsite, I called Mary to ask her how it was working. Was the new HR Shared Services organization delivering? Did she miss Lucinda?

“Sure I miss Lucinda,” she told me, “but I don’t need her.”

Then she pulled out her checklist to make sure we were both on the same page for our work going forward.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Sign up to receive an email when he posts.

How to Handle Surprise Criticism

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Any criticism can be hard to accept. But surprise feedback — criticism that seems to come from nowhere, about an issue we haven’t perceived ourselves — is the hardest. We’re far more likely to be defensive.

Because it’s not just about admitting, it’s about perceiving. Before we can accept something, we have to become aware of it. Like the criticism I received on the NOLS course, the feedback to my article completely blindsided me. I had no idea people would react the way they did, no sense that I was writing anything controversial.

That kind of feedback exposes you to yourself, which is why it is both tremendously unsettling and exceptionally valuable. It’s also why our defensiveness is so predictable and so counterproductive. The things we most need to hear are often the things we defend against hearing the most.

To take in surprise criticism more productively, we need a game plan. As you listen to the criticism and your adrenaline starts to flow, pause, take a deep breath, and:

Look beyond your feelings. We call it constructive criticism and it usually is. But it can also feel painful, destabilizing, and personal. Notice, and acknowledge — to yourself — your feelings of hurt, anger, embarrassment, insufficiency, and anything else that arises. Recognize the feelings — label them even — and then put them aside so the noise doesn’t crowd out your hearing.

Look beyond their delivery. Feedback is hard to give, and the person offering criticism may not be skilled at doing it well. Even if the feedback is delivered poorly, it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable and insightful. Not everything will be communicated in “I” statements, focused on behaviors, and shared with compassion. Avoid confusing the package with the message.

Don’t agree or disagree. Just collect the data. If you let go of the need to respond, you’ll reduce your defensiveness and give yourself space to really listen. Criticism is useful information about how someone else perceives you. Make sure you fully get it.

That means asking questions to further explore what you’re being told. Probe. Solicit examples. Maybe even play devil’s advocate, pushing the criticism back on itself, in the spirit of understanding it more fully.

If you’re worried that will look defensive, then explore the criticism with a third party instead. After receiving critical comments to my article, I asked several people — trusted friends who know me well enough to be honest with me — whether they saw what some others who were critical saw.

Later, with some distance, decide what you want to do. Data rarely forces action, it merely informs it. Recognizing that the decision, and power, to change is up to you will help you stay open.

Once you’ve got some time, space, and grounding, think about what you heard — what the data is telling you — and make choices about if, what, and how, you want to change.

Sometimes, you’ll choose to change your behavior. I learned a lot from reading the comments and discussing them with others. I realized that what I considered playful, others saw as hurtful. That to experiment for my own gain is ethically questionable. That my message can be lost when my examples are controversial. And that I have to be careful about my tendency to put my needs over the needs of others.

But sometimes, you’ll decide not to change your behavior. That perhaps, you’re better off staying the same and changing your surroundings. After that NOLS course, I led several more expeditions, but I never felt that I could live up to my colleagues’ expectation of a quiet, authoritative, slightly removed outdoorsman.

Eventually, I left NOLS and joined the Hay Group, a consulting firm in NY. In my first week, I remember sitting quietly on a client call led by Andy Geller, a senior partner. About 20 minutes into the call he pressed the mute button and said “Peter, say something. Anything. I know you can add value to this call and the client needs to know it too.”

He turned the sound back on and I smiled, thinking: Talk more? I like this consulting thing!
Criticism can be an incredible gift, a field guide for acting with impact in the world. All we need is enough patience and presence to read it.

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Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Sign up to receive an email when he posts

If You Want to Be Original, Start from a Different Box

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I was stuck. Not in the I have writer’s block or What next action should I take? kind of way, but in the literal sense. I was riding an ATV (All Terrain Vehicle), which looks like a motorcycle but with four huge, balloon-like nubby tires, and I was stuck in mud, with my two rear wheels spinning hopelessly in the glop.

What surprised me is that my two front wheels were solidly planted on dry land, just sitting there, motionless and unhelpful.

I looked ahead at my friend Joseph who had made it through the mud with ease on his ATV and who owned the one I was on.

“Hey Joseph,” I yelled over the roar of the motors, “are ATVs only two-wheel drive?”

“Yours is.” He laughed. “Most were, until a few years ago.”

That struck me as more than odd. I mean, even my minivan is four-wheel drive. Why would anyone make an All-Terrain Vehicle — whose main purpose is to travel through rocky, muddy, slippery woods — that’s only two-wheel drive?

The answer, I discovered, is simple yet profound: ATVs evolved from motorcycles, and motorcycles are powered solely by their rear wheels.

If the ATV had been derived from a Jeep — a scaled down, minimalist, sit-on-top version of a Jeep — there’s no question the first one out the door would have been four-wheel drive. And far more suited to the task of an ATV.

Which got me thinking: if you want to be original — to really think out of the box — you might be better off starting from a different box than you’re in.

But that’s easier said then done: how can we escape the confines of our own history?

Michael Newcombe is the general manager of the Four Seasons in Dallas. I wrote about him in The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies. The recession has hit the hospitality industry hard since I wrote that post and yet, when I stayed at the hotel recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how little the downturn seemed to affect the hotel’s atmosphere. The quality of everything was impeccable, the staff were warm, and morale seemed high.

So I sat down with Michael again, this time to discuss how he’s managed to keep morale high in the midst of the downturn. What I learned was a lesson in out-of-the-box thinking.

In the hotel business, jobs are specialized: maids clean the rooms, golf attendants prepare the golf carts, and gardeners do the landscaping. Historically, in a downturn, you cut each of those positions to the minimum necessary to keep things moving at normal demand.

But demand is rarely normal. During a golf tournament, you need more golf staff; during a corporate event, you need more dining staff. When there’s a spike, the skeleton staff in a particular area get overworked, and performance, as well as morale, suffers.

Entering this downturn, there were two things that were most important to Michael and his executive committee: remaining fiscally responsible and maintaining a high-quality guest experience. So their goal was to reduce staffing costs while keeping morale high — an almost impossible combination. Almost.

That’s where they got creative. Rather than following history, they started from their goal and worked backwards, questioning everything else.

Which is how Michael and his executive committee decided to ignore the silos. They focused on retaining their highest performing core staff — the ones who’d been with the hotel for 15 to 20 years — no matter what department they were in. That left gaps in certain departments. Then, they aggressively cross-trained their core staff. The people in laundry learned to clean golf carts. Housekeeping learned to landscape. And room service learned how to work in the restaurant.

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Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Sign up to receive an email when he posts.

Peter Bregman suggests, “Don’t regret working too hard”

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I was lying in bed, safely reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.

I put down the magazine and thought about death.

My mother-in-law, who was in her late sixties, died not long ago after a long battle with cancer; she was first diagnosed in her forties. A few weeks ago I received a call from a friend in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. At lunch last week, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew he had. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.

And now I was reading an article by Atul Gawande [click here] about rethinking end of life treatment. Gawande is not just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life; he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”

I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But somewhere in the middle of that article it suddenly hit me — not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally: I am going to die.

Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey [click here] asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day. (The New York Times created a fascinating interactive graphic using the survey as raw material. [Click here] by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their most common regret? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Their second most common regret? “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

There are two ways to address these regrets. One, work less hard and spend your time living a life true to yourself, whatever that means. Or two, work just as hard — harder even — on things you consider to be important and meaningful.

If you put those two regrets together, you realize that what people really regret isn’t simply working so hard, it’s working so hard on things that don’t matter to them. If our work matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, than we will die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We will have lived more fully.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Click here to sign up to receive an email when he posts.

Peter Bregman on how to avoid (and quickly recover from) misunderstandings

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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To be fair to me, I was pretty focused at the time, working in my office on an article. When my wife called my name, I really didn’t want to be interrupted.

We were going away for the weekend and what Eleanor wanted to know was, could I help with the packing? She shouted from the bedroom, raising her voice enough to be heard between the two rooms. I yelled that I was working on deadline.
She yelled back: could I at least pack the shampoo?

Now that just seemed ridiculous to me. She wanted me to get up from my computer, walk over to the bathroom, grab the shampoo bottle, and put it in our suitcase? She was in the bedroom already packing everything. It would take her ten seconds to do it herself.
“Listen,” I shouted, “can’t you just put the shampoo in the bag? It doesn’t seem like a big deal.”

“Fine” she yelled and as soon as I heard the tone of her voice I knew I had made a critical error. I had missed the entire point of her request. I thought it was about packing the shampoo.

Welcome to the land of clumsy communication, misunderstandings, and unnecessary arguments escalated by not paying enough attention.
On one level, Eleanor’s request was about packing the shampoo. But even then, I had misunderstood what she meant. She thought I hadn’t yet packed my own toiletry kit and was asking if, when I did, I could pack some shampoo into a small bottle for the family. A reasonable request.

On another level, Eleanor’s request had nothing to do with the shampoo. It had to do with the fact that Eleanor is always the one who packs for the family and she’s sick of it. She asked me to pack the shampoo because she needed to feel like she wasn’t the only one packing. Like we were in this together. In some ways, she was being generous by asking me to do something as simple as pack the shampoo. She could have asked me to get all the children’s clothes together. She was being sensitive to my deadline. I’d missed that.

And then there’s the final, deeper and more profound, level — a level impossible to reach in a conversation carried out between two rooms. This, she wondered as she was packing, is how she’s using her Princeton education? Her masters degree? Her role as the packer represented, to her in that moment, the failure of equality, women’s rights, and her own decision-making about her work/family choices.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Click here to sign up to receive an email when he posts.

Peter Bregman on why friends matter at work and in life

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Susan Harrison, my mother-in-law, died several months ago after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Like most of us, she was not famous. If you didn’t know her you probably didn’t know of her. She lived in the relatively small community of Savannah, Georgia.
Yet she did some amazing things there — she was the first ordained woman Deacon in Georgia, she founded a soup kitchen, and she helped create the Savannah Homeless Authority. In addition to raising three children and, some would say, a husband.

One of the problems we faced after her death was finding a church big enough to hold the people who wanted to attend her funeral. We picked the largest one we could find, with seating for 600, and still many had to stand in the back and along the aisles.

Susan had a particular quality that drew people in. It wasn’t her accomplishments. It wasn’t money. She had no access to famous or important people. She couldn’t hire you; she wasn’t a stepping stone.

Susan was, quite simply, a really good friend.

Which is an art. To be a good friend, you have to give of yourself, but not so much that you lose yourself. You need to know what you want and pursue it, while helping others achieve what they want. You need to have personality while making room for, and supporting, other people’s personalities. You need to care about, and even love, people you might disagree with (I’m pretty sure she didn’t vote for the same candidates as her husband). You need to be willing to give at least as much, if not more, than you take.

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Want to stay in that job you have? Then you’d better have friends. As a friend of mine who runs sales for a successful technology company told me recently, “People try hard not to fire their friends. It’s the difference between ‘he’s a good guy’ and ‘I don’t know about that guy.’”

The happy truth is that the people who say they’re not here to make friends don’t win. That’s true for reality TV. It’s true for business. And it’s true for life.

During Susan’s last few days she was surrounded at all hours by her family and friends. During those moments she managed to get some advice out. Among her parting words? “Surround yourself with a loving community.”
In other words, it’s a pretty good bet that we really are here to make friends.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.