Your are too Serious!
John came to me at noon time. He opened our meeting with serious business topics talking professionally about projects and resources. After our discussion, he relaxed and smiled at me: “Elizabeth, would you please give me some feedback?”
I smiled back at John, “I would like to pass on feedback I once received from one of my mentors.”
Harry, the Executive Chairman I worked for, had a productive meeting about software global resource strategy with me. At end of the meeting, I asked for his feedback. Harry looked at me with a serious face: “Elizabeth, you are too serious, and you are too scary!” Then he laughed.
What an astonishing remark! I was too serious and too scary! I viewed myself as a nice, flexible and resourceful professional. I knew for fact that I was not outwardly humorous. However, I was not boring either! What could I do to correct that impression?
Solutions appeared. A few days later, my husband came home with a tip on effective communication with executives. He picked this up from his SVP, Mark, at a manager’s meeting at Cisco. Mark demanded answers to these three questions at all his meetings:
1) What are you trying to tell me?
2) What do you want me to do?
3) How do you want me to feel?
Question number three never crossed my mind. I assumed that executives are super beings, with superior business acumen and judgment. I never assumed that their feelings were in the equation!
When we brief senior executives with facts and problems, we set the stage for solutions, prepare the senior executive to make decisions and let him know what you wish him to do.
However seldom, do we consider how we want our executive to feel.
We forget executives hold stressful jobs and they hear problems with and without solutions constantly throughout the day. They are people too. They have feelings and their feelings influence their decisions. We sometimes pass on our amplified stress at the end of a long day without thinking explicitly about how they will feel.
Once I started treating executives as human beings, respecting their time and feelings while providing suggested solutions with problems presented, I am no longer that super goal-oriented, laser-focused, scary and deadly serious person.
Now, when I talk to my teams, I asked the same three questions. Especially the 3rd one, how do you want your team to feel?
Elizabeth Xu
Register Stanford Class at: https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/course.php?cid=20111_WSP+229
I smiled back at John, “I would like to pass on feedback I once received from one of my mentors.”
Harry, the Executive Chairman I worked for, had a productive meeting about software global resource strategy with me. At end of the meeting, I asked for his feedback. Harry looked at me with a serious face: “Elizabeth, you are too serious, and you are too scary!” Then he laughed.
What an astonishing remark! I was too serious and too scary! I viewed myself as a nice, flexible and resourceful professional. I knew for fact that I was not outwardly humorous. However, I was not boring either! What could I do to correct that impression?
Solutions appeared. A few days later, my husband came home with a tip on effective communication with executives. He picked this up from his SVP, Mark, at a manager’s meeting at Cisco. Mark demanded answers to these three questions at all his meetings:
1) What are you trying to tell me?
2) What do you want me to do?
3) How do you want me to feel?
Question number three never crossed my mind. I assumed that executives are super beings, with superior business acumen and judgment. I never assumed that their feelings were in the equation!
When we brief senior executives with facts and problems, we set the stage for solutions, prepare the senior executive to make decisions and let him know what you wish him to do.
However seldom, do we consider how we want our executive to feel.
We forget executives hold stressful jobs and they hear problems with and without solutions constantly throughout the day. They are people too. They have feelings and their feelings influence their decisions. We sometimes pass on our amplified stress at the end of a long day without thinking explicitly about how they will feel.
Once I started treating executives as human beings, respecting their time and feelings while providing suggested solutions with problems presented, I am no longer that super goal-oriented, laser-focused, scary and deadly serious person.
Now, when I talk to my teams, I asked the same three questions. Especially the 3rd one, how do you want your team to feel?
Elizabeth Xu
Register Stanford Class at: https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/course.php?cid=20111_WSP+229
Comments
This is an excellent post. To tell the truth, I never "seriously" considered my boss feeling, either. Sometimes I could see him look really tired, but I haven't thought about making things easier for him, but that's when I could feel he is not a superman.
I learned from a popular Chinese book "Du Lala's Promotion" that when presenting a problem, I need to provide at least 2 good options for boss, so that either he could choose from them, or could develop a better one out of them. I think this is a good way to avoid driving bosses nuts by chores.
It's kind of hard to tell whether a person is too serious though. Sometimes it's true, but other times it's because the person focus too much on details, or critical about a problem. Maybe in this case, we need to just relax a bit, have some smile, slow down our presentation, listen more to partners. Hope we don't "scare" people any more:)
I do love what you said during the SCEA conference: Make your company win, make your boss win, make your people win and then you'll win.
Thanks,
Yingying