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Question number 3: How do I manage myself?

It’s lonely at the top

The way to the top — every top — is long and often crowded. Yet only few really make it there, and the way up is never ever easy. You have been working hard and intelligently to get into the position you are in today. But that doesn’t finish the job! Getting to the top is one thing, staying there and achieving great things for your company is another. You are shrewd, hard working, persistent, self-confident, wise at some moments and a risk taker at others, well educated, emotionally and intellectually intelligent, and maybe you have been lucky at times. Yet, as the saying goes: luck favours the well prepared.
Being a manager, you have surely used all your resources and selfconfidence while avoiding the trap of over-confidence. In reflective moments, you probably once in a while say to yourself: “I got the top job because I was able to play the corporate game to this level. Of course I am competent, of course I am intelligent, of course I am an expert in handling business as a top professional. I earned it to have been selected for this top job, and the people who supported me on my way up are no fools.
They are in for shareholder value, and I am good at providing just that. Sure, the pay and everything that comes with my top position is good. Of course, it is a stressful job, but hey, pressure comes with the territory.” Once in a while some managers feel loneliness at the top. If you don’t recognize this feeling: congratulations, how did you do that? However, occasionally feeling lonely at the top is all too common. Some even say that this is the toughest feeling that comes along with the top job — the cliché is correct: it is lonely at the top. “I don’t belong to another group anymore. I am the top manager, and there is just one spot at the top. Being a CEO is no T.E.A.M. sport: there simply is no team that provides me with shelter from the storm. If we hit success, success shines on me, and I have learned that distributing success among my employees makes me a better leader. If we hit trouble, trouble lands on me personally. Being the acting CEO feels like a one-man show with an audience of hungry wolves staring at me and waiting for my first wrong move. As a CEO, I sit high in the corporate tree, but the storm wind is howling. I’m visible, and I do feel vulnerable. On top of that, I’m afraid and convinced that if I show my vulnerability, the wolves are out there to get me. I sometimes feel scared, but am afraid of that feeling, even a little ashamed. That is not something a top manager ought to feel. If only the others knew how much I sometimes feel like an impostor…’’

What can you do?

You may feel lonely but the fact is that you are not alone! Rest assured that you are not the only person in a high position with these thoughts and feelings. No matter how difficult it may be at moments, having selfdoubts, feeling scared and overwhelmed by certain difficult decisions that you have to make alone is normal. Virtually no one will ever admit it in public, yet practically everybody recognizes these negative moments. Furthermore, a person who never doubts him- or herself is so self-centered that he or she has no openness to what happens around them. That is not the stuff successful managers, let alone CEOs, are made of. Now it’s one thing to have these doubts, it’s entirely another to nurture them.

Here are a few insights that you might want to try:

• Think of moments in the past when you were doubting yourself: what did you do to stop doubting and start acting? What worked best then?
• Remind yourself of your resources and the way you have used them on your way to the top.
• Remember the people who helped you on your way up: how did they do this? What was most helpful then? Can you find a similar person now?
• Write these thoughts down in as much detail as possible and keep this document in a safe place. The next time you find yourself in doubt, reading this personal document, written when your emotions were not clouded, will help you to recover faster.
• Talk to someone you trust and respect that is not involved in your organization and has no stake in your professional life. Being able to vent your loneliness and doubts, and just being listened to without getting advice, is often the shortest way out.
• Beware of the inevitable corporate yes-men and flunkeys, hear what they say but don’t listen. Instead, keep searching for authentic opponents and counterparts, who have no stake in opposing you but sharpen your ideas by their opposition.

To summarize:

• Guard your self-confidence as your most valuable weapon.

Question number 2: Work smart, not hard!

How can you manage to work less hard as a manager, and still get your employees to work smarter?

Dear reader, this is your captain speaking. Please look at the instructions in the seat pocket in front of you. What follows is crucial information, so please sit tight and listen carefully. Because of your lack of time, I will say this only once.

For those readers that, instead of reading the whole book, were lured to this paragraph because of its enticing title, congratulations: you are the truly lazy ones! Why read a book when you can learn from reading one paragraph? Now, if you want to learn how to use the simple solutionfocused
tools in the easiest way possible, read the rest of this paragraph and then jump to chapter 5, The Man in the Middle. There you will find a real-life case study in the form of a story. However, beware: after reading chapter 5, you might — and this is our sincere hope as authors — be lured into reading even more of the book.
For those readers who took the effort of working themselves through all of the preceding pages: congratulations and thank you for your time and effort. If the title of this paragraph makes you think that what you are reading now contains the ultimate secret of the solution-focused model: again congratulations. This means that you truly understand what the solution-focused model is all about, and you already know the secret by now! This secret is: More is less, and less is more.
But hey, I thought that managers are supposed to work hard, or at least harder than their employees. Are we not paid for putting in the extra hours, the extra stress, the extra mile? Sure, but sweating when you work does not necessarily mean that you work efficiently, especially not when you are a manager. Managerial sweat ought to be reserved for the gym!
Remember, management is the art of getting things done through other people. Doesn’t this imply that you are not supposed to do everything yourself? Instead, your job is to create an environment in which your employees perform optimally. Your job is to help them work smart, more than just hard. Now, what is working smart?
You all know the famous acronym for the description of goals, of course. Classically, “S.M.A.R.T.” stands for: Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Time-bound. And as you know, a lot of smart management involves goal-setting and making sure that goals are attained whilst keeping a resource focus. With our adage “simple works best” in mind, working smart is defined by a precise balance between input and output: maximum results with minimal effort.

Tips from the hitchhiker’s guide for the lazy but efficient manager:

• Set clear, concise, and obtainable goals for the short, mid, and long term and make sure these are in line with the overall goals of the company.
• Make sure to involve your employees when setting goals: the more involvement, the more ownership, the more motivation and the better the results.
• Make sure to demonstrate the four tenets (page 22) of the solutionfocused model in everything you do as manager.
• Be a hunter for exceptions to the problem, for these open doors towards solutions.
• Prefer resource-drive over goal-drive.
• Encourage your employees to be as open as possible with themselves and each other about their own resources.
• Indulge in what goes well in the team, and make plenty of compliments about everybody’s contribution.
• Don’t be shy when it comes to giving compliments.
• Don’t be shy when it comes to criticizing.
• Don’t be shy when you take decisions. Just keep everybody involved in the consequences of your decisions.

How to deal with Covid19 in a Solution Focused manner.

First of all, we wish you all lots of strength, success and health in these difficult times. We also wish you some luck because an invisible enemy like a virus is counting on statistics. So: as we say here in Belgium these days: stay in your kot (at home), wash your hands and keep your distance.

Many of you are on the front line, others on the second line and each of you will contribute to the best of your ability to tackle this (inter)national health crisis.

We all work in service to people. Some solution oriented insights that might be useful:

  1. Exactly follow the guidelines of the real experts.
  2. Physical health comes first, but our mental health also needs hygiene: limit social media and new statistics to a daily minimum, do not participate in disaster tourism from behind your computer ….
  3. A little scare is useful if you can use it as a resource, don’t panic.
  4. Many -myself included- experience a (slight) mourning for the threatened self-evidence of our existence. Accept this and help others to see it and accept it.
  5. Resilience as the ability to undergo disruptive life events, get through them and learn from them, is now vitally important. Train this skill in the way that best suits your abilities and situation.
  6. The international outbreak of Covid19 for us, the general public, is not a problem but a limitation. The way we deal with this limitation is a problem for which a good solution is thinkable. For the scientists Covid19 is a problem, not for us.
  7. Contact is the motor for change but also the resource for healing. This crisis teaches us that physical distance can be a platform for emotional closeness.
  8. Find together with your beloved loved ones what still works, what gives you a small (and why not: a big) pleasure. A fat book, an hour in the sun, the best bottle of wine instead of cheap wines, a tele-cuddle…
  9. More than ever: HOPE IS TO THE HUMAN MIND WHAT OXYGEN IS TO OUR LUNGS.

Per ardua ad astra,

Louis 

Question number 1: What is the solution focus all about?

Three-minute explanation

Imagine you are in the elevator with your CEO and she gives you three minutes to explain what this solution-focused mumbo-jumbo is all about. This is what you might say. To set the right tone and get her in the mood for what’s coming, you could start by saying:

“Good morning, Mrs. CEO. Thanks for asking me about our solutionfocused project. I’m glad to get a chance to talk to you about it.”

And of course, business comes first, that’s what the CEO is interested in:

“This project is on time and within budget, and this is mainly due to the efficiency of the solution-focused management approach.”

While you look her in the eyes to get her attention, you use a little yesset:

“It also fits very well with our culture. Here at XYZ company, we have always been pragmatic, haven’t we? At XYZ, we aim to get results as fast as possible.”

Now prepare the CEO for the more difficult part while at the same time you reassure her that you are really talking business:

“Well, being pragmatic and achieving the company goals fast and efficiently, that’s what solution-focused working is all about. The extra edge that the solution focus gives us lies in cooperation, the concentration on our strengths, and working on goals rather than spending too much time analyzing problems.

We don’t go searching for the causes behind problems because if you do that, more often than not, you end up with a situation in which you are looking for the person to blame rather than getting the problem solved. Just like when you have a flat tire — you don’t spend too much time trying to find out why it is flat. You get a new tire and try to make sure that it stays inflated.

Concentrating on our strengths enables us to utilize the company’s resources, both the personal resources of our staff and the resources of the company, optimally. To access the personal resources of our staff, we as managers ask them solution-building questions rather than providing them with all the answers. This way, we develop their competency and get customized results.

When a new solution is developed by our staff, we make sure it gets passed around so that everybody in our team and the company as a whole can benefit from the learning. You know the old saying: T.E.A.M. —
together everybody achieves more.”

So far this all sounds well and good to the CEO — however, is it credible? It’s time for an example:

“Last week, two of my sales managers were arguing with my project engineer about our new product. They told him that one of the clients complained, not about the quality of the product, but about the difficult technical manual that goes with it. The engineer started defending himself and the sales people kept going at him. Soon they were accusing each other of all kinds of mistakes. In the heat of the argument one of their colleagues came in and got involved in the discussion. He complimented both parties on their commitment to the company and on their efforts to do the best possible for the client. This took away some of the heat of the discussion. He then asked them if they had had similar problems in the past and how they had solved them then. It soon came out that in the past they had solved similar problems by writing an additional “getting started” manual and by putting the engineers in contact with the client to explain all the technical features. The project engineer said that his people would love to do that again, and the sales managers immediately saw a commercial opening towards the client. They agreed to propose this as a new procedure at the coming meeting for the complete team.”

Add a little clarification:

“Our people all encounter problems of some sort. This is perfectly normal, and it comes with business life. Working in a solution-focused way does not mean that we are problem-phobic nor that we are naive optimists. On the contrary, problems are there to be solved. The major difference is that we deal with problems from an entirely different viewpoint. We solution-focused managers see problems as golden signposts to  possible solutions. This model offers lots of insights and simple, ready-touse tools to enhance the productivity of our human resources.” 

Time to go in for the kill:

“You see, working in a solution-focused way is hugely practical and handson, no mumbo-jumbo involved. It’s about enhancing the ability to create sustainable solutions quickly, and this is essential for economic success. In the end, everybody benefits: our employees, we as managers, and the company as a whole. To put it in one sentence: “Simple works best.”

PING: The sound of the elevator at the top floor.

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