I just finished reading this story about a waitress who successfully handled a difficult customer with strategic kindness (via a tweet by @zappos).

To me, it’s both an encouraging, and discouraging story. I want to believe that kindness is gift that one gives without expecting an outcome; that it is selfless. At the same time, I also know that it can be the most gentle way to externally influence someone’s behavior.

Perhaps it is a means to an end, but the strategic application of kindness might also undermine its value and make gentle acts seem calculating.

In grade school we are taught to answer the questions that are asked. An authority figure (usually a teacher) poses the question and the students provide the information requested.

I think that it’s a sign of the autonomy of adulthood to resist providing the answer when the point of the question is unclear or misdirected. Asking about the context that a question is asked in can be the most effective way to determine if you are going the right direction.

Sometimes the best answer addresses a different question.

Seven deadly sins: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality, and worship without sacrifice.

Gandhi

Back in my illustrious career as an ice-cream scooper, I remember the panic I felt when the local little league team lined up outside the handy take-out window. This window was only operational during the summertime, and only ever got much of a line after little league games or other events around town. The take-out line was not a consideration when the staffing schedule was set up; we managed that line with the same number of bodies (usually one, maybe two) as if we had only inside, restaurant business.

I could write a whole book about management experiences and lessons learned from the horrible ice cream job. (I’ve done far more emotionally-charged work but this is the only job that gave me regular anxiety dreams.) But one night, thanks to a visibly endless take-out line I learned a special lesson about how I worry and how to end it.

When the outside line started to stack up, it was physically impossible to lean across two big rows of ice cream bins and then look outside the window to estimate the length of the line. Anyone working the window had to survive it moment by moment.

Everytime the line started, I worried. I worried we’d run out milkshake cups and be forced to climb into the restaurant’s attic to find new ones (and lose ten minutes in the process). I worried the line would grow and we’d be scooping past closing time. I worried everyone would want super sundaes. All these things I could not control, but I worried they were lurking behind each order and would ruin (?) my night.

That one night I was working alongside my shift manager, who’d stepped in to give me a hand. She was the only manager likely to do this, and I was more than grateful to have her help. She was running around in a bit of an anxiety-swirl as well (this job was really not for the feint of heart) and was muttering under her breath about the milk shake cups and ice cream cone stock. Every time she worried, it was as if part of my worry ebbed. I was not anxious that night, though I was working as hard as ever. It surprised me, I even found a sense of humor and could boost her morale a little bit. This one night I was protected by my manager, who was thinking ahead and taking the brunt of the anxiety for me. When she worried, I didn’t have to because I knew she was on it.

Now, of course worrying doesn’t do anyone any real good. But in this job, worrying was the way I coped with what I now see were major management problems. I didn’t have the resources to do my job well, we were perpetually understaffed, and had no power to change a bit of it. So really, worrying was the only thing I could do (and is not a choice I generally recommend).

But I am grateful for what I learned from my manager that night. That a good manager can anticipate problems, take the big picture view, and try as hard as she can to take the brunt of the worry for her employees. Which lets them do their jobs.

One of the best things you can hear as a leader that you are inspiring.

But what does that really mean?

It might be that you told a clever story. Maybe, you have an unusual skill. Did they laugh? It could be that you have lived your life in a manner that seems exceptional. Perhaps, you have beaten the odds.

That’s not all. To be inspiring is not a gift, or chance. To inspire is a skill that answers the fundamental desire of those who can sit still enough to listen: make me better.

Inspiration is not just about the presence of the exceptional, it’s about how one person’s life influences another. It means that something about you resonated with someone and caused them to consider changing something about themselves. It is one level of success to be able to change yourself, it is an entirely additional achievement to motivate that change in others.

And inspiration is a responsibility. If you are in the vaunted (and often not so vaunted) position in the front of the room, you have the responsibility to create the conditions that others can achieve. To be clear – you are not responsible for anyone’s individual success, only for conditions that create the possibility. Your leadership is wasted, and your chance to inspire is lost, if you haven’t considered the potential of success for the others in the room.

If you haven’t yet figured out how to create the space for those who aspire to walk away better than they walked in- there’s still time. If you don’t think that inspiration is part of the job description of leadership – you can’t step aside fast enough.

I think fear of failure can paralyze, but a healthy fear of being barely adequate can liberate.

via half-heartedly

Every good manager has to think about the what-if. What if it doesn’t work? What if we’re not capable? what if it’s a bad idea? What if someone tries to rip us off? The analysis what-if begs the potential of it – might. Asking the what-if question is designed to calculate risk and inform action.

Except when the it-might becomes the it-will.

It’s never a good omen when managers turn the corner from anticipating potential obstacles to expecting disaster. What-if is the reasoned analysis of the possibility that something will go horribly wrong, it-will is a potentially unfounded paranoia that not only will something go wrong – but that those we have enlisted to help us will actively work against us. In that frame of mind, hard becomes harder, and difficult becomes impossible.

The it-will mindset breeds a kind of cynicism that prepares us to look at the potential worst outcomes of our dreams and ponder the underbelly of those we ask to help achieve them. When immersed deep in the it-will mindset, we spend our energy preventing phantom deception and mayhem, not creating.

37 signals posted this last week about simplicity – and it’s a great point.  But I also think that it could be an illustration of a business approach that strives to keep their eyes on the product, and not getting distracted by the potential it-will.

Great post about the 12 things your brain does to trick you – my personal favorite?

I’ll just avoid the things I don’t like doing
It is usually the difficult tasks that our minds try to trick us into avoiding. Unfortunately, these are oftentimes the very things that would result in the greatest rewards for us. What do you put off doing? Why? Procrastination and avoidance of completing important tasks or resolving nagging issues only delays your march to happiness. Attack these head-on and you will find a deep sense of gratification that will fuel your happiness.

the other eleven are worth it as well – via Dumb Little Man

New realization for the morning: am I making things harder for myself by comparing what I think I should be doing to what I am doing?

Meaning, rather than spending productive time moving myself from what I am doing to what I want to be doing, I spend endless amounts of time and energy being stuck in the morass of frustration. When instead I can focus on the trajectory: where am I now and what can I turn this into?

It’s advice I give organizations/businesses frequently but so rarely use myself. Old habits, I suppose.

Today I say an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about how people who are homeless are becoming more of a presence online.  Robert Livingston, one of the folks who provided statements for the interview, said something particularly striking:

“It’s frightening to be homeless,” he says. “When I’m on here [the Internet], I’m equal to everybody else.”

Often, technology is  described as a threat: it is the borg, the T-100, the matrix.   Technology at its most insidious aggregates, assimilates and anonymizes — in all the wrong ways.  Occupants of cube farms decry the depersonalized office.  Parents worry that Facebook  and Twitter have killed the possibilities of meaningful friendships.  Attention spans have been replaced with multi-tasking.  Research has been replaced with web browsing.

But I think they are mostly wrong. The Internet (and the technology that drives it) doesn’t make us less human, it reflects humanity — in all of the best and worst ways.

Wikipedia has (largely) credibly democratized the organization of knowledge, and what in fact knowledge itself is — but more importantly, expanded public engagement with the acquisition of knowledge.  It doesn’t matter if anyone can contribute to a collection of ideas if nobody does.  This process of community dialogue, debate and revision is the original way communities created knowledge before the responsibility for gathering and shaping knowledge was ceded to formal institutions of learning and corporations in search of profit.

Twitter isn’t a new method to destroy our already meager ability to communicate, I think that it has filled in the void left by the death of small talk.  Once, when our ancestors wandered along the streets of their villages and towns they exchanged pleasantries.  They inquired into the details of each other’s life.   The point of such talk was not the literal-bottom line of information dissemination – it was a subtle way of checking in; of communicating interest in another person’s well being.  In the US, I’ve heard it said that in the South they have 100 ways to ask about the weather – I’m absolutely certain that most of the time the question had noting to do with barometric pressure or the possibility of rain.

Today, in a world where communication is associated with productivity, interacting with people means that you talk about the big stuff – and avoid the little stuff.  Too often, there is a disproportionate premium  placed on listening to people when they are saying MONUMENTAL THINGS, and making EARTH-SHAKING REVELATIONS.  Phone calls are short (and often even avoiding the most rudimentary salutations), and to the point.  This is great news for business – terrible news for the humans who make business happen.

How many times after a tragedy does someone utter “if I had only known”: that he was depressed, that she was scared, that they were alone, that she was angry, that he was at the end of his rope.  Information like this is often not shared in big declarations – it’s eked out in small moments and benign statements – exactly the kind of thing that can happen on twitter, or facebook, or myspace.  There is already one very public story of this happening, I suspect there are many more quiet moments.

Social networking sites connect to that fundamental human desire to speak, and to listen.  And we don’t just mean when we are talking about the meaning of life.   We also want to talk about movies, we want to talk about our pets, we want to talk about what we had for dinner – we want to talk about the experience of living.  And, as the exponentially exploding number of participants on these sites seem to indicate – we are also listening.  We listen when someone across the country tweets that they have had a bad day.  We listen when a long-lost friend from high school reaches out after years of silence.  We listen when someones kid just scored their first soccer goal.  We listen when someone we don’t even know posts about a tragedy they witnessed from across the world.  We listen to political rants, and philosophical raves.

We use technology  fill our lives with the very noise some technology was originally created to filter out – the noise of the public square, the noise of other people living their lives.

And like the rest of human interactions, not all of these communications will make us smarter.  Not all of the words posted online will be true. The Internet won’t make people harmeless or eliminate greed and treachery.

In fact, the internet doesn’t make us anything – it only connects us, as we are, to one another.