SHORTS | Take Control and Stop Blaming Others with Steven Gaffney

I forget what sparked this in me, but it was about six years ago where I suddenly had this realization that anytime someone in my team hasn't quite delivered what I needed delivered, I started to say, well, where does the blame sit? Or why did that happen? And I've shared this with groups, and you can really see a degree of unease when I share it. But it's a fun thought experiment to try and find a reason why we, the communicator, we the leader, aren't responsible. And I've never really been able to find a way where the finger doesn't point back to me. So if they've misunderstood it, I wasn't clear enough in my communication. I didn't write that email clear enough. If the person couldn't deliver on time because they had other stuff on, well, I didn't fully appreciate what else they was working. I didn't help them prioritize. If the wrong person has come into my team, then I didn't recruit thoroughly enough. It's really interesting to turn it back on ourselves. And out of that, I got to the point where I've just got a new assistant started. But Amanda, my old assistant, whenever she would do something for me and it wasn't what I needed, I'd make a point. The very first thing, I'd apologize. I say, sorry, Amanda, I've wasted some of your time here. I wasn't clear, and I said, this is what I need. And I think a lot of the time it's because we're working at pace, right? And some of the context that's in our head doesn't make it out of our mouth or onto the document that we're producing. So I guess it's back to understanding your point. That kind of power of control rest with us rather than trying to appoint blame everywhere else.

Absolutely. And I love what you're saying because it's factually correct. But here's my argument. Even if it wasn't, which it is, yeah. It's still our advantage to take responsibility of the situation. It doesn't work in life to blame anyone for our happiness, our money situation, whatever it is, it's to our advantage to put ourself in control. So the way I like to view it is powerless is that mood is when we're in the backseat of our car, conditionally powerful is. Is we're in the front passenger seat, we're trying to urge the driver.

Yeah, nice.

But unconditionally powerful is when we're driving our own car and there's so many things so let's talk about another tool out of the. The book that people can use and I've been teaching, which is how to reframe this situation, right? So somebody isn't moving. We can say, well, you know, you just got to work harder, or whatever, but maybe we can reframe the entire situation. So in the book, I've identified my three favorite reframes. One of them is to reduce the frame. And that is where we look at a situation that's very complicated and we make it simple. And we might say to someone, okay, while this is a major transformation, I do a lot of stuff with change. I might. And I've worked with a lot of leaders on this is. And they'll say, well, people aren't moving. And so because it's too complicated, what you want to do is say, although the vision is huge, what I need you to focus on within the next month or quarter is just focus on these few things. So if we reduce the frame, it actually has people move forward. Confusion causes delay. Confusion causes delay. And a great example of this is you go to a restaurant, and if the menu is many, many pages, you'll see people like, scouring over it and, you know, trying to do this. But it's interesting that some of the best restaurants have limited the choices, right? And so by the limiting the choices, it actually helps us move forward. So, for example, do we say to our boss or someone, well, what would you like me to do? Or do we say, give me some ideas of what to do? Or do we say, I've studied the situation and I've identified these three actions. My number one recommendation is this. Do I have your approval to move forward? That would be an example of how we've taken a situation that we want our boss to help us with and reduce the frame. Or as a leader, if we want a lot of people to move, how to make something that's complex, simple, that's all about reducing the frame. We can talk about other reframes, but the point being is that we can create a different context, a different frame that actually gets people moving. And that's, again, if it isn't working, how do I reframe the situation so people will move forward?