StandOut (14 page)

• You want to win me over. You are very creative in how you do this and I often end up enjoying what could possibly have become an unpleasant interaction. Once you’ve greased the wheels with my liking you, make sure you move quickly into solving my problem. I want to like you, but I want my problem solved more.

• It doesn’t surprise me that your motto is “Every client, every time.” Your service is consistent, and if you can swing some additional benefit to thank me for my patience or make up for an inconvenience, you’ll find it. Be creative with this and you’ll stand out in my mind and my loyalty to you and your company will grow. (Be prepared: If you do this once, I will come to expect it of you! You’d better have lots of good ideas.)

• You’re incredibly proactive, so show me how you can get me answers quickly. When you sense my frustration with the standard corporate reply, don’t wait for me to ask to speak to your manager. Anticipate this request and go right to the top, right away. Make sure I see you do it.

• Encourage simple steps to help your team win me over. It could be as simple as telling your team to ask me “Any problems, you let us know.” Or it could be a structured check-in meeting where we challenge you with “Please tell us anything and everything we could be doing differently.” I will be more likely to rate my experience higher when you and your team proactively raise these questions.

• Your charm and sense of humor are engaging. Your stories are delightful. Find opportunities to connect and check in with me just because. I will be more forgiving when there’s a service miss.

PIONEER

The Definition

You begin by asking,
“What’s new?”
You are by nature an explorer, excited by things you haven’t seen before, people you haven’t yet met. Whereas others are intimidated by the unfamiliar, you are intrigued by it. It fires your curiosity and heightens your senses—you are smarter and more perceptive when you’re doing something you’ve never done before. With ambiguity comes risk, and you welcome this.

Instinctively you know you are a resourceful person, and since you enjoy calling upon this aspect of yourself, you actively seek out situations where there is no beaten path, where it’s up to you to figure out how to keep moving forward. You sense that your appetite for the unknown might be an attempt to fill a void, and some days you wonder what you are trying to prove to yourself. But mostly you leave the questioning and the analyzing to others, and revel in your pioneering nature. You are at your best when you ask a question no one has asked, try a technique no one has tried, feel an experience few have felt. We need you at your best. You lead us into undiscovered country.

You, at Your Most Powerful

• You see the world as a friendly place where good things can happen. You are not naïve, but when you think of all the possible outcomes, your mind naturally goes to the best of all possibilities. Your distinctive power starts with your optimism.

• You have a strong bias for action. You are excited to discover new things, to experience new things, and you know this will happen only if you take the first step.

• You don’t neglect the need to learn and gather information—since you are an explorer at heart, you like learning new things. It’s more that you believe action is the very best way to learn. What is around the next corner? The only way to know for sure is to walk around the next corner.

• Ambiguity? Uncertainty? Risk? None of these bothers you too much. You are comfortable with gaps in your knowledge, with an incomplete set of facts, because with your optimistic mind-set, you tend to fill in the gaps with positives.

• You love beginnings. At the start as you imagine where events might take you, you feel the excitement ripple through you, sharp impulses nudging, pushing, impelling you to act.

• As you move off the beaten path you are fully aware that you will meet obstacles, but for you these obstacles are part of the fun, a sure sign that you are going where none have gone before you. In a strange way, they actually invigorate you.

• You move, move, move. Your life is about forward motion and momentum. As such, you are dismissive of anything that slows you down. Negative attitudes, complaining, inefficient rules or processes, you jettison all of these quickly and keep moving forward. On your journey you travel light.

• For you, new is fun. New is unknown, and the unknown challenges the status quo and shows you different avenues forward. You read deeply within and around your subject so that you can be the first to encounter new techniques, trends, and technologies.

• “Pattern interrupts” of any kind—new ideas, new goals, new projects, new people—all of these grab your attention. Can they keep your attention? Well, that’s another matter.

• Other people are drawn to you because of your forward motion. You are clearly on a mission of discovery, and we want to join you on it. Who knows what we might find, and who might benefit?

How to Describe Yourself (in Interviews, Performance Reviews)

• “I love taking the first step. As long as I can remember I was this way. When I was in school . . .”

• “ ‘Try it and let’s see what happens.’ That’s my motto.”

• “I find I learn best when I experiment.”

• “People see me as persistent. I just keep moving forward.”

• “I’m one of the most resilient people I know. I bounce back fast. For example . . .”

• “I am constantly reading up on the latest research and trends. Here are a couple of things that are intriguing me right now about our business . . .”

• “I’ve got to say I’m a great recruiter. I can get almost anyone excited about coming on the journey with me.”

How to Make an Immediate Impact

• You are not threatened by change or uncertainty, so
put yourself in the middle of it
. Seek it out. Your confidence will rise, your judgments will be sound, and you’ll feel alive. For many people, the opposite is true.

• Know that you will always be an exciting—and sometimes disruptive—addition to the team. To ensure you lean more toward the exciting end of the spectrum, make sure you tie your new ideas, your new tools, and your new technologies to a problem your team is trying to solve.
Show others how your new “toy” can help them get what they want
.

• You can immediately help a team get unstuck. So to gain your team’s goodwill,
seek out a roadblock they’ve hit
and give it the full force of your “Well, why don’t we try this?” or “Have you thought about going around this way?” questions. Make sure your ideas are practical, stay with it, keep pushing to find a path of least resistance forward, and they will remember it and thank you for it.

• You are curious first, critical second. Most people are the other way around. So
lead with this open-mindedness
. When someone presents a new plan, help them run with it by asking questions and supplying them with the sort of detail that naturally occurs to you when you’re thinking about the future. Do this often with your colleagues and you will come across as both calming (they won’t worry that you will stamp out their fragile new idea) and inspirational (you will help them see an increasingly vivid picture of what might be).

• Because you see little benefit in “if only” thinking, you can help your new colleagues move on from past struggles or failures. Whenever they lapse into deep postmortems,
take it upon yourself to describe what good might happen the next time around
. Soon they will look to you, whether overtly or not, to redirect the team’s focus forward.

How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level

• You see the “new world” and are excited by its mysteries. This makes you a potential leader of others. But remember, to get others to join you on your mission you have to describe this “new world” as vividly as you can. The more detail you give people, the more certainty they’ll have, and the more likely they’ll be to put aside their anxiety about the unknown and follow you. So, before you embark on your mission,
get your details together and practice your descriptions of what they will discover and how they will benefit if they sign up
.

• You have a natural instinct for change. It will serve you well to “bottle” that instinct.
Work out a formula that captures your natural instincts for how to handle uncertainty
. Turn them into a clear process that other, less risk-oriented people can follow. In your career you will meet change often. Your formula can ensure that you have a turnkey method for rallying and focusing the people around you.

• Practice and get comfortable with a few phrases that express your natural optimism
without making you sound like a reckless fool or a naïve idealist. For example, when colleagues say, “We can’t change the way we’ve always done it,” instead of saying, “Yes we can. Just try it,” ask a nonthreatening, easy-to-answer question, such as “Well, if we had
already
changed it, what would the new way look like?” This won’t save you every time—some people will always be suspicious of your optimism—but by assuming that the change has already been made, it may help others break through their initial inertia.

• Find ways to showcase how your innovations have succeeded in creating new business opportunities or new products
. These examples of how inquisitiveness turns into performance will give people more certainty, and they will become increasingly tolerant and even supportive of your pioneering spirit.

• Since you are curious first, critical second,
you could make a fantastic mentor
. You allow people to show you their best and reveal to you their dreams, and your instinct is to take the ride with them, asking one question after another, each question carrying them along a little further, a little faster. Yes, at some point, as an experienced pioneer, you should bring your critical thinking to bear on their dreams. Nonetheless, what’s truly powerful about you as a mentor is your willingness to let young talent run.

What to Watch Out For

• You will always be intrigued by what’s new, but you don’t want to give the impression that you are simply distracted by the next shiny new object. So, to avoid this reputation while still exposing yourself to the novelty you need,
commit yourself to a disciplined schedule of “inquisitiveness.”
For example, pick three great conferences a year to attend. Or once a month hold a “what’s next?” roundtable, hosted by you. Or build an innovators’ social community within your organization. Any one of these will a) help you feel spirited and alive, and b) give credibility and rigor to your bright-shiny-objects curiosity.