The Immersion Technique

Conventional wisdom says that if you want to learn a language, go to a place where they don't speak anything but that language. This is the immersion technique and people learn languages very quickly because they don't have any choice. You are forced to practice every minute of every day. If you go and take a language class then maybe you get 3 hours a week of in-person instruction and a couple more of homework, but then you have 163 hours left in the week in which you will speak English. In an immersion setting you get the entire week, 168 hours devoted to just that language.

It must have been about 7 years ago that I cultivated a unique opportunity for myself. I was at HUD and I put together and Individual Development Plan that had me go into the Philadelphia Field Office for a few weeks to review Annual Action Plans and monitoring letters. Those few short weeks were terrific for me. Once I could feel the pain of what it really means to review one of those action plans and the findings from a monitoring visit I had the knowledge I needed to do some cool work. I worked to develop the Consolidated Plan Management Evaluation Tool which was a pretty big deal for the Department.

I found a great opportunity to use that monitoring knowledge when I came to USDA. One of my first projects was to develop a monitoring (audit) system. Because I had personally felt the pain of that work I was more sensitive to what the stakeholders were telling me was important. This experience really helped me to be successful in deploying the project on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.

This is a key aspect for people in Information Technology. Empathy is something that cannot be faked. People in IT need it to be effective in dealing with stakeholders. If you are dealing with business stakeholders and they know that you are clueless about the nuts and bolts of the business process then you will come off as either in-authentic or incompetent if you try to fake it. Neither are positive drivers of a successful project. There should be a law passed that people in IT have to feel the business pain every once in a while.

The other part of these immersion experiences is that they are really difficult. You are forced to stretch and quickly understand things that were unknown to you a short time before. That is part of the growth. You learn to adapt to these new conditions. As masochistic as it might sound, I love this stuff. I love the opportunity to get thrown into a new situation. I don't believe that I was getting complacent as a program manager, but I was definitely starting to feel like I was not being challenged. It is the challenge that drives me, and if I'm not challenged then I can become somewhat distracted while I look for new challenges.

All of this is background for my latest challenge. I've taken a 4 month detail as the executive assistant to the person in charge of a mission area in the Agency. This one is a real stretch for me because I have so little domain knowledge, and in this detail, domain knowledge is the key to the game. The bottom line is that this is a for-sure challenge for me, and I find myself more energized than I have been for a few months to really work at it.

My goal with this blog has always been to shoot for about 6 posts per month. I fear that I'm going to be missing my target in the coming months because I have been completely consumed with this detail. If the first week is any indication, I'm not planning to eat lunch any more. So, I'm sorry that I may have to curtail some of my writing, but know that I'm having fun, and hopefully I'll have a whole new box of experiences to write about after.

Conflict

One of the best pieces of wisdom I can give away is for you as an individual to know yourself very well. You can't control other people and their actions, but you have complete control over how you react to situations. Conflict happens. People disagree about things all the time. You can't control the actions of the people across the table but you can and must control your own. The first step in this process is to understand your natural reaction.

Years ago I participated in a leadership program that used a product called the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. This was a standardized questionnaire similar to the Myers-Briggs and DiSC tools. You go through, answer 20 or so questions and then plot your results. I wasn't surprised by what I found. Results are plotted along 2 axis, Assertiveness on one and Cooperation on the other. People who are not assertive and not cooperative are essentially avoiding conflict. People who are cooperative but not assertive cave in and are essentially accommodating others. People who are both cooperative and assertive are known as collaborators. People who are very assertive and not so good with cooperating are known as competitors because they compete.

This was years ago, but I was strongly in that that Competitor profile. When there would be conflict, I loved that because I would always take the challenge and work to win. It wasn't until I was exposed to this conflict assessment tool and we discussed it that began to understand that my profile wasn't the best. It probably would be the best for a trial lawyer or maybe a stock broker. But my job is to help take a group of people on a journey and to feel good about the destination once we arrive. If all I ever do is compete with people, we may find the finish line, but we won't likely feel very good about the journey. That isn't a complete success.

When I saw my results and took some time to understand them, I decided that Collaborator is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be both assertive (which was no problem for me) AND cooperative. This is where I started using language like, "If we can make everyone a winner, it is worth the effort." I am certain that I have moved the needle on my conflict style. I may not be squarely in the collaborator camp, but I am certain to not be in the competitor one either.

This kind of growth can only occur when you recognize those tendencies in who you are and how you naturally react. Only when you recognize this can you hope to control and change it to be what you want.