Author: jhyman@jeffhyman.net

Yan Wang, the former CFO of VitalSmarts, didn’t survive Mao’s China by taking outlandish risks such as questioning those in positions of authority. As our CFO, she did impeccable work with the highest ethical standards. But challenging the status quo was deeply unsettling to her — especially if it meant critiquing the actions of one of our company owners.

She was literally trembling one day when she suggested to my colleague Al that the few dollars he was bringing home from selling copies of our book at public events was hardly worth the time it took our accounting team to process them. She fumbled around the issue until Al said, “So what are you suggesting I do, Yan?” She gulped an enormous amount of air and finally confessed, “It would be smarter to just give them away.” Al agreed. Yan was almost always right. It just took a while to figure out what her opinion was.

Fast-forward a decade. Our company had grown tenfold, and so had Yan. She had become the backbone of accountability in our company. No one, including major shareholders, was off-limits when it came to maintaining standards and creating a culture of fiscal stewardship. Her team was at the forefront of identifying ways to maximize our margins.

Yan’s story is not uncommon. Our research shows that 97% of people can readily identify a career-limiting habit they have. We’re unreliable, lack empathy, avoid conflict, or fear risk. While we’re clear that our weaknesses cost us both personally and professionally, few of us make any progress in turning them into strengths. In fact, managers report that after giving people feedback in a performance review, fewer than 10% of them look any different a year later. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like Yan, we can make substantial change in relatively short order. The key to improving most weaknesses is to:

Identify Crucial Moments

Chronic weaknesses are usually not due to simple cognitive or behavioral gaps in our abilities. When you’re sitting in your office with a daunting presentation to prepare, and you keep checking your inbox and returning calls instead, it isn’t because you are bad at prioritizing. Rather, you are playing out a deeply habitual and practiced response to feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or fear. Most of our bad habits have this same nature; more is going on than meets the eye. The way to make progress is to identify the nature of the moments that provoke these ineffective responses. Pay attention to the times, places, social circumstances, moods, physiological states, or risk perceptions that incite you to act in ways that lead to bad results. These are your crucial moments. The good news about crucial moments is that they shrink the size of your problem. Change seems daunting when you think it requires eternal vigilance. In fact, it’s usually about handling a few minutes per day better than you have in the past.

Yan became aware that her crucial moment was when she felt a need to disagree with someone with greater organizational power. She was pretty blunt with peers and direct reports, but speaking up to the owners of the company contradicted every instinct. She felt encouraged when she realized that she didn’t struggle with candor in general — only in those specific circumstances.

Design Deliberate Practice

The Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that our learning curve steepens the most when we engage in what he calls deliberate practice. These are brief episodes of intense focus where we practice a skill under relatively real conditions. If these intense practice episodes are coupled with immediate feedback, learning accelerates even more. Psychologist Albert Bandura refers to this as guided mastery and found that we can overcome profound emotional barriers to success if we engage in this kind of skill rehearsal under circumstances with the right mix of safety and challenge.

Once you identify your crucial moments, do what Yan did: Identify moderately challenging situations where you can practice the target skill. For Yan, simply framing these occasions as “practice” lowered the stakes and increased her motivation to attempt them. Following each attempt, she did a mental debrief, rating her effectiveness and stress level. Over time, she found the first rating went up and the second went down, which gave her a greater sense of competence and confidence for the next round. She was careful not to jump into the deep end of the pool at her first attempt. She began by challenging business owners who were late in turning in their expenses. Later she addressed concerns about their spendthrift tendencies — something she felt even more anxiety about.

An important element of deliberate practice is the focus on a discrete skill. Yan studied up on skills for crucial conversations and decided to focus on one: creating safety. She opened a conversation by making an overt reference to the common purpose she hoped she shared with the person she was confronting. In her first attempt, she found this gave her a sense of confidence by suggesting a script with which to begin. But her confidence grew even more when she saw how it put the other person at ease and reduced defensiveness.

Develop Emotional Competence

Be sure your plan includes development of skills for managing the inevitable emotions that accompany confronting a weakness. Simply forcing yourself to attempt a terrifying or uncomfortable behavior is not a success in and of itself; provoking these unpleasant emotions will simply reinforce that this is an act to be avoided. You must seek out tactics you can use to make the unpleasant act more pleasant, or at least manageable. By doing so, you gradually retrain your brain to change its formula for predicting how you’ll feel in your crucial moments.

Yan found that her emotions calmed if she took a moment to clarify her motives prior to opening a crucial conversation with a more powerful person. Before scheduling the conversation, she paused, took a deep breath, and asked, “What do I really want?” Historically, her desire was to avoid conflict with powerful people, but this conflicted with her deeper values. As she pondered what she really wanted, she connected with her desire to be a person of integrity and strength. This awareness helped her subordinate her fears to something more important — and quieted them significantly. It gave her a feeling of focus and determination.

One of my most cherished memories of Yan is the day she let me know that I had wronged her. She told me with great conviction that I had been unfair in the stock award she had been given, relative to others in the firm. She tactfully expressed her disappointment and laid out her case for a different calculation. I ultimately agreed with her argument. But more important, I was struck that the person who admonished me that way was markedly different from the one who trembled out a suggestion to Al just a few years earlier.

You can change your own career-limiting habit if you identify your own crucial moments, seek out brief and intentional opportunities for deliberate practice, and build skills in addressing emotional barriers to your progress. Don’t let fear or inertia hold you back.

Joseph Grenny is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leading social scientist for business performance. His work has been translated into 28 languages, is available in 36 countries, and has generated results for 300 of the Fortune 500. He is the cofounder of VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development.

In the United States, Aflac has earned the distinction of being the number one provider of voluntary insurance at the worksite.

As a current policyholder and also a former officer at Aflac, I am often asked about Aflac Japan and the huge success that it has been. As I am discussing Aflac Japan with people, many times, those who are asking don’t realize the success of Aflac U.S. and its contribution to Aflac Incorporated. As I was listening to the investor call this morning, I decided to write about it to help others better understand Aflac U.S. and some of the numbers that drive the success.

Over the last 11 years, covering from 2006 -2016, Aflac U.S. assets have grown from $10,249 billion to $19,453 billion.

In that same time period, Aflac U.S. revenues have increased from $4,027 billion to $6,167 billion in 2016.

Aflac U.S. pretax profits have grown from $585 million in 2006 to $1,208 billion as of December 31, 2016.

There are many factors that drive the success, for example, lower claims cost, controlling operational expense, or investment income, but the one that I look at closely is, “the average number of weekly producers, i.e., agents & brokers.”

In 2016, the “average weekly producer equivalents were 9,061,” while the average weekly producer production was $163,501, according to Aflac U.S. investor documents. While the average weekly producer number has decreased each year since 2012, the average production number has increased the last seven years.

Aflac U.S. continues to make adjustments as needed to prepare themselves for the future and the forever changing voluntary worksite market. It will be interesting to watch from the sidelines and watch their success in 2017 and beyond.

With the Presidental election over, and all the conversation about the various styles of leaders who were running to be president, I thought now would be a good time to talk about leadership and the different types of leaders.

I have been blessed to have been employed at some world-class organizations throughout my career. I was at General Electric when Jack Welch was the incredible leader. I was at Aflac under the leadership of Dan Amos and who continues to serve as CEO, and I was at Willis North America, led by Dominic Casserly, who guided Willis through some challenging and changing times. Three very successful leaders who performed at a very high level and shared many of the leadership skills and attributes that are needed to be an effective leader.

Earlier this week, I came across an article that I had saved from 2005, “Seven Transformations of Leadership.” The authors, David Rooke and William Torbert, discussed the different types of leaders.

Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”—how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and fewer still have explored the possibility of changing it.

They should because David Rooke and William Torbert found that leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies. In their close collaboration with psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter—and their 25 years of extensive survey-based consulting at companies such as Deutsche Bank, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hewlett-Packard, NSA, Trillium Asset Management, Aviva, and Volvo—they’ve worked with thousands of executives as they’ve tried to develop their leadership skills. The good news is that leaders who make an effort to understand their own action logic can improve their ability to lead. But to do that, it’s important first to understand what kind of leader you already are.

What type of leader are you?

1)      Opportunist – Wins any way possible. Self-oriented; manipulative;

2)      Diplomat – Avoids conflict. Wants to belong; obeys group norms;   doesn’t rock the boat

3)      Expert – Rules by logic and expertise. Uses hard data to gain consensus and buy-in.

4)      Achiever – Meets strategic goals. Promotes teamwork;juggles managerial duties and responds to market demands to achieve goals.

5)      Individualist – Operates in unconventional ways. Ignores rules he/she regards as irrelevant.

6)      Strategist – Generates organizational and personal change. Highly collaborative; weaves visions with pragmatic, timely initiatives; challenges existing assumptions.

7)      Alchemist – Generates social transformations. Reinvents organizations in historically significant ways.

Regardless of what type of leader you work for or what style of leader you are, you must have “ Core Values” that includes Integrity, Vision, Ethics and Trust.

Remember, each, and every time you are in front of your employees or independent sales force, you are Selling the Vision and Values, of your company, and you are seeking buy-in from those who are in your audience.

Finish strong the last four days of January and I wish all of you a great first quarter and a record breaking 2017!