Are We Hardwired for Success?

Chuck Martin: Basically we are. There's a part of the brain, and this is not sort of business theory, this is actually based on decades of neuroscience brain research, people are familiar with the left and right brain because people have been writing about that for many, many years. But there's another part of the brain called the frontal lobes and that's the part right behind your forehead, and in the frontal lobes there are 12 specific cognitive functions. They're called 'executive skills'. Now they have nothing to do with Executives; they're only called executive skills because they help you execute. And Psychologists, years ago, identified these specific skills and they are things like, oh, time management, task initiation, organization, stress tolerance, focus and so forth, and everyone has these 12 skills, and everyone has two or three that are their strongest and two or three that are their weakest, and they're really not dramatically changeable by the time you become an adult. So, in terms of the wiring of the brain it's a very real thing and, interestingly, these 12 specific cognitive functions or skills map beautifully to what happens in the business environment. Now this book I did with two noted Psychologists, Doctor Richard Guare and Doctor Peg Dawson, and they've been dealing with executive skills in children and adults for about 20 years now so, again, this is well-grounded in neuroscience research. All we did is we transferred it for normal business people so they could see how their brain basically is already mapped before they get started in the work environment.

Rachel Salaman: So what about your own research you've done on this? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Chuck Martin: Yes. NFI Research, which I also run, we surveyed 2,000 Senior Executives and managers in 47 countries every 14 days. We've done this for eight years now, and what we do is we share a lot of information in terms of the marketplace and what's going on in business. Well, what we did is we did about a year's primary research on this topic, which identified basically a lot of the problem in business and, as you were mentioning earlier in your introduction, in terms of people playing to weaknesses, that is exactly what people very instinctively do in business today. They hire someone based on their strengths and then, for the next six months, they try to fix their weakness. And everyone in business knows what this is about; everyone's working on trying to fix someone's weakness, and what we argue is that the weakness is really not, it's not fixable. Somebody can't be fixed. It's like someone is 5' 7" and they would prefer to be 5' 9". Well they can do all the stretching exercises they want; they will still be 5' 7". And it's very much the same way with executive skills and cognitive function of the brain, what you are is what you are, but once you know that, it's an enormous opportunity to identify how to get into situations to play to your strengths because, when you're under the gun, when you're under pressure, which everyone in business is under pressure today, and our primary research shows that 99% of people in business today are stressed, either highly stressed or somewhat stressed. A third are highly stressed so, when you're under pressure, your weakest executive skills fail first so, if you're in a position that requires your weakest skills, then you've got a serious problem.

Rachel Salaman: What's the difference between executive skills and personality? Perhaps we should establish that right at the beginning.

Chuck Martin: Well, personality is really based on sort of softer things, you know; it's sort of like more of a touchy-feely type of thing, and the executive skills are based on hard brain research, neuroscience brain research that says, under specific conditions, predictable results will occur in terms of how the neurons fire in the brain. It's not a soft thing. For example someone, if their highest skill is time management, that will be their highest skill. If their lowest skill is time management, they can go to ten time management courses and, when they do the questionnaire, which we have in the book, we have an instrument that you define what your highs and lows are, if you go to ten time management courses, when you do the questionnaire, again your weakest skill will still be time management and it doesn't really change.

So here are the 12 skills:

#1.

Self-restraint, which is basically the ability to allow time to evaluate a situation before you speak or act on it so, if you're high in that you can, sort of, think before you speak; if you're low you get your foot in mouth all the time because you speak too quickly.

#2.

Working Memory, and that's not just memory, it's the ability to hold information in memory while doing complex tasks so, if someone says, "Do this, this, this and, when you've done that, do this," and, if you're high in working memory, you remember that and you do it and, if you're low, you forget that one thing. It's like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that."

#3.

Emotion Control: that's being able to manage emotions so you can direct behavior, achieve goals. If you're low in emotion control, if someone mentions something negative to you at the beginning of the day and it bothers you all day and, if you're high in emotion control that just rolls off your back and you move forward.

#4.

Focus: that's being able to maintain attention to a situation, not be distracted by fatigue or boredom or anything else.

#5.

Task Initiation: and if you're low in that you procrastinate; you just wait, you don't start, and everyone knows someone who's low in task initiation. And, if you're high, basically you get going right away, so it's the ability to begin projects in a timely manner.

#6.

Planning prioritization: that's being able to develop a road map to get to where you want to goal, reach a goal, know what the important signposts are along the way. You sort of can organize things methodically.

#7.

Organization: that's being able to arrange materials or tasks according to a system. If that's your lowest skill your desk is probably a disaster area. It just has things piled everywhere and, if you're really high in that, it's very natural for you to keep things sort of in order in your workspace.

#8.

Time Management: that's being able to estimate the time required for a task, meet deadlines; allocate time effectively. And it's not just staying on time; it's actually knowing, when someone says, "Here's a project for you to do," you actually say, "Okay, I can do this and it's going to take, oh, probably three, three and a half days," and you'll be 95% right all the time; it's a very natural thing of how your brain calculates.

#9.

Defining and achieving goals: this is the ability to set a goal and follow through despite competing interests, and that's one of my highs. That's why I've done seven books and I've always hit the deadline, but I never knew why, until I did all of this research.

#10.

Flexibility: being able to revise plans due to setbacks, new information; sort of roll with things.

#11.

Observation: that's the ability to kind of step back and look at how you would do things better, and you very naturally say, "How can we improve this next time based on what I did this time?" If you're low in that, you tend to make the same mistake over and over again.

#12.

And last stress tolerance: that's being able to thrive under fire, in the face of uncertainty, whatever, but you really sort of look at stress as an opportunity, not a problem.

So those are basically the – those are the 12 cognitive functions. Now, Clinical Psychologists have – I mean, they have other – they have technical names for these, things like meta-cognition, self-regulation of affect; we relabeled some of them, like to these names, to make it more accessible for normal people like your listeners, but any Clinical Psychologists who hear these, they will know exactly what they are in their clinical terms.

Rachel Salaman: Now you mentioned that everybody has a couple of key strengths and a couple of key weaknesses; is that true across the board or do some people – are some people lucky enough to have more strengths than weaknesses?

Chuck Martin: Typically, and this has now been done over thousands of people, typically it is two or three that are high and two or three that are low. In some cases, some will have maybe three or four that are high, but they're really extreme exceptions. And, what's interesting is, it's only the highs and the lows that matter, those that are in the middle won't get anybody in trouble, so you can pretty much ignore them. Now, in a normal day, in normal circumstances, everyone has all 12 skills and they operate fine, so they've got, you know, their task initiation's fine, their self-restraint is fine, and so forth but, when they're under the gun, the weaker skills go first. So, if your weaker skill, you know, is time management, if your weaker skill is time management and you're under a lot of pressure, you will have no concept of managing time; it will just go out the window. If your lowest skill is task initiation, which is the ability to begin projects in a timely manner, then you won't be able to start anything; you'll basically just be going around in circles, and so forth and so on.

Rachel Salaman: Do men and women tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, or is it not possible to differentiate like that?

Chuck Martin: We don't know; nobody knows. We haven't tested enough, well, no-one, I mean Psychologists haven't tested enough women and men separately and matched the results, so we don't really know that; nobody knows that yet. Over time we will find it out, but it's probably going to take years and many thousands of people to do the instrument, the questionnaire. What is interesting though is we did define a way to measure the job, so in SMARTS we talk about – well, there's a quick seven or eight minute questionnaire and you can determine what strengths are required for a specific job or task. Then you can look at what are your strengths or weaknesses and you can see if you actually match to the job. If your strengths are required for the job, then we call that a 'goodness of fit', that's a good situation. If the job requires what are your weakest executive skills, that's what's called an 'effortful task'; you might be able to perform the task, but it will be really difficult for you to do it, which is why someone would be at work saying, "Oh, this thing that I do at work is really hard," and someone else who's really high in that skill will say, "Well how could that be hard, that seems so natural?" Because your brain actually adapts for what the situation is, and it does tax the brain when you're doing something that requires your weakest executive skills.

Rachel Salaman: In your research, have you discovered that some strengths are more useful to have than others?

Chuck Martin: What we found is that the strengths that are best to have are those that are required for the job. For example, if your highest skill is task initiation, which is you can start projects, you know, right away, you don't really procrastinate. If your highest skill is task initiation, but you're in an environment where everyone else is always getting something started; you've got an assistant who says, "Come on; it's time to go to this meeting," then your task initiation, having that high skill doesn't really matter, because it's not needed and it's not necessarily useful. If, on the other hand, you're a Project Manager, then task initiation being high would be very good and very, very desirable to have, so it really depends on the job, and in the book we have a lot of – we've actually identified jobs that require specific skills. And I'll give you the classic example: sales and sales management and the skills required for sales are different than the executive skills required for sales management, which is why people – I'm sure some of the listeners have an example in their past lives where a great, great salesperson who's just absolutely terrific, gets promoted to sales management and becomes an absolute disaster in sales management. Well, the skills required for sales are, the executive skills are: flexibility, emotion control and defining and achieving goals. For sales management the executive skills required are: time management, planning prioritization as they're managing other people, organization, and observation, so they're totally different. But this also can explain by the way, and here is the great irony, someone who's not doing well in sales might actually be mismatched for their cognitive functions for sales, but they might be a perfect match for the skills required for sales management, but the irony is they won't get promoted because they're not being successful at sales, when it turns out they would in fact be very successful in sales management based on their executive skill set.

Rachel Salaman: Well, can you describe some of the tools in your book which help people identify, a) what strengths they have, and also what jobs those strengths match?

Chuck Martin: Yes, we have a questionnaire, an instrument, and this instrument is actually being used by the American Management Association to do seminars on this. They're actually basing a whole seminar series, starting in June this year, around the United States, based on SMARTS and the instruments and concepts in the book, so we're very excited about that. There's a questionnaire that takes about, somewhere between seven and ten minutes and you answer this, and it identifies all of your 12 skills and what your highs, mediums and lows are. Then there's another questionnaire that lets you identify the skills required for any job. It could be a job, a task, a project, anything and you just answer these quick questions and then you know, and then you just match that against your own. And then there's a third tool which lets you actually measure what the organization truly values, so an organization may have you in a job that is a perfect match for your executive skills, but it may not be what the company truly values. As a result, you might be doing well in that job and you never get promoted, and this sort of explains the 'why' you're not getting promoted, because your values, or what you provide, is not what the organization values. For example, an organization maybe consider themselves a 'sales' organization, in which case you can go look at the executive skills required for sales and see if you have those. If you do, you're probably very well aligned with the viewpoint of the organization, so those are the tools. Then we give you a set of questions that you can ask once you know what your strengths are and you're looking for – say you're interviewing for another job or position we give you questions that you can ask which probes to determine if that position requires what are your strengths. And, if you know this, and the person you're interviewing with does not know it, you have an incredible advantage in that interviewing situation. We also then show a manager or executive how to hire and measure what is needed for a job and then what kinds of questions to be asking the interview candidate to see if they are strong in those specific skills. What typically happens in a business, and I'm sure your listeners are very familiar with this, where someone who's being interviewed to be hired and they're interviewed by two or three people and, at the end of the process, the two or three people doing the interviewing get together and say, "What did you think?" "Oh, I really liked her." "What did you think?" "I liked her too." "Oh, okay, let's hire her." Then we hire her and then, six months' later, we're having the conversation with the person, "We're sorry we have to let you go. We really like you, but you're not working out." And what happened was, the people doing the hiring tend to, very naturally, be attracted to people who have the exact same executive skill strengths that they have, but they may not be the strengths that are required for the specific job that they're interviewing for. So, what we recommend to people is find someone in your organization, in management obviously, whose skills and cognitive function match the skills for the job, and have that person be part of the interview process, and then give their input to the discussion after much more weight than the other people, so that they may not actually – they may actually like the person more than you like them; that's because they have the executive skill match for the specific job.

Rachel Salaman: Have you seen this work in action?

Chuck Martin: Yes, we actually have had several cases because, what's happened now, is people are getting the book and they're deploying it company-wide. We have one organization in Pennsylvania where the Chief Operating Officer got the book; then he had all of his managers do the questionnaire, so they evaluated what their management team strength was, and then they actually rolled this out company-wide and they determined what the #1 executive skill collectively they had as a business. And the COO had a key person who he was having a real problem with, but it was a really key employee, and never knew the reason, and this instantly explained what the problem was, and they basically did, they did a workaround and then just eliminated the problem, like instantly, or literally overnight, and he's just thrilled because he didn't know what he was going to do. And that's what we're hearing pretty consistently from companies where they'll get this, then they'll really get it, and then understand, "Oh well, so I've been trying to fix this thing in this person and it's really not fixable." That's correct. It doesn't mean it's bad because everyone has weaknesses; it just means that you need to deal with understanding what the executive skill weakness is, know it's not going to be fixed, and then look at what to do. And there are things you can do for weaknesses; there are environmental changes and behavioral changes, which we detail in great detail in the book how to deal with that, because you can't fix an executive skill weakness, but you can in fact address the biggest problem that a weakness might cause. For example, if someone is, their weakest skill is time management, and we run into this all the time in our interviews, if their weakest skill is time management and the person is basically late for everything, you as the person can go to your boss and say, "Hey, what's the one thing that would make my time an issue?" And they say, "Well, if you make the Thursday meeting on time." Well, what you do is you pull out all the stops and you always make the Thursday meeting on time. You haven't got any better at time management, but you've eliminated the problem, the biggest problem that it causes, and then it doesn't become an issue in your business or in your daily work life.

Rachel Salaman: I'm sure our listeners would like to hear how they could improve on other weaknesses. Have you got some more examples of common weaknesses?

Chuck Martin: You can't really fix the weakness. What you do is, in every case it's really the situation. You have to look at what is the situation that is being caused because, if you are the subordinate, once your boss comes down on you for a weakness, like for being late for things, it's almost too late to fix something. You need to step back, like today, right now, and say, "Okay, here are my strengths and weaknesses. My weakness is whatever. What is the problem, what is the biggest problem that causes in my work environment?" And then what you do is you go and address that one problem. You don't try to fix your skill because you can't. So, if you're high in flexibility, you can kind of roll with the punches, like, "Oh yeah, let's do this," or, "That's fine, let's do this." If you're low in flexibility, you are relatively rigid and, what happens is, your brain can't handle not having things decided, so it decides things on its own, literally, and that's how the neurons fire in your prefrontal cortex or your frontal lobes. So you've made a decision and someone's giving you input on the way by and you're saying, "Oh yes, yes, yes; oh yeah, yeah, yeah," but you're not really hearing it. They perceive that you're not communicating well, that you don't listen well; when it's not that you don't listen well, it's that you've actually decided. So what you do, if you're dealing with someone who is low in flexibility, you have to give them time to adjust, so, before a meeting with someone who's low in flexibility, like the day before or a few hours before, send them information that you're going to bring up at the meeting. So, by the time you get to the meeting, they already know what it's going to be, so they're not having to reset their brain; it's been reset already, so they're more open to whatever you want to do. Another example: someone who's low in focus. Focus is the capacity to maintain attention to a situation, despite distractibility, fatigue, boredom. And I just addressed a group of several hundred Chief Financial Officers last week, and one of the questions was from a Chief Financial Officer and he said, "The CEO of our company is really low in focus, what do I do?" And what happened was, in his case he was sending these memos to the CEO and the CEO would say – he would see the CEO and say, "Did you get my memo?" "Oh yeah, I looked at it," but he clearly didn't read it because it was a long memo with great detail and didn't pay attention. He would go into a meeting with the CEO and he said, like, after five minutes, the CEO is just, like, drifting and not paying attention. So what we advised that person was, for someone, dealing with someone who's low in focus, you need to break things into very short pieces of information, so send a very short email with just one subject per email. When you go to a meeting, get directly to your point when you still have the person's attention and then get that one thing done. Don't go in with multiple things on an agenda; just get one thing at a time done and deal in shorter periods of time, and then you'll eliminate the problems caused by your boss's lack of focus. Interestingly, we're finding that, even though we wrote the book for managing and managing down and healing subordinates and peers and teams and so forth, what people are looking at doing, they're looking to better manage their boss, which is really something that sort of surprised us, that that's what people – and we're hearing this all the time. People are looking to better understand the people they work for and we've actually had people sending us notes saying, "I'm going to share this with all my colleagues, but not my boss," because, once you have this information about how the brain actually works and what cognitive functions are, you're just greatly advantaged over others who don't know about it.

Rachel Salaman: Well it does seem like it's just as useful to be able to identify other people's strengths and weaknesses, as it is to identify your own.

Chuck Martin: Oh, absolutely. What's interesting is, once you know this, once you're familiar with the 12 skills, it changes how you view everything. Every interaction you have with somebody, you say, "Oh, they're low in stress tolerance," or whatever.

Rachel Salaman: Do people ever have problems identifying their strengths and weaknesses?

Chuck Martin: Well, they don't have problems identifying them; sometimes they have problems accepting them. We hear that from executives and managers all the time, where they'll tell someone, "We have a problem with your such and such weakness," and the employee says – they basically don't agree. They don't buy in that that's the problem, but someone – in the questionnaire in the book you can lie and make it sound like you're good at everything, but it doesn't change your skills. I mean, you're still – you are what you are. So someone who is high in time management, they know they're high in time management, 'cause they're on time pretty much all the time. And it's really interesting, is when you ask them when they started being good at this, they'll answer and they'll think for a minute and say, "I've always been good at it." That's because that's how their brain works. It's how their brain has been essentially hard-wired. So, if someone's good at task initiation, being able to start projects right away, they've always been good at it and they're considered sort of a 'go-to' person to get something going. Children, I think this is a great example 'cause I know some of your listeners are parents, if your child is low in planning prioritization, you tell your child, "Pick up your room," and you come back an hour later and the room is still a mess. You say, "I told you to pick up your room. Pick up your room." When you come back an hour later it's still not picked up. Well, when you're saying, "Pick up your room," the child who's low in planning prioritization, they don't know what that means. You may as well be speaking an animal sound to them; it just makes no sense. But, if you go up and say, "Put your socks in the drawer; put your shoes in the closet; hang your shirt," you've accomplished the task of picking up your room but, what you've done is, you have become the external frontal lobe for your child for that moment, because you've broken down the task so they can actually execute it because they're low in planning prioritization. They can't plan and prioritize what to do first. They don't know where to start; as a result they don't start, and it's the same thing at work. If you know someone who's low in planning prioritization, then you basically give them tasks as you want them done; you break it down as opposed to giving them 'the big project'. Someone who's high in defining and achieving goals, that's the person you give sort of the big, "Here, go get this done." You don't have to give them details of how to do it, and the book is filled with little tactics like that. But once you know the 12 executive skills, it becomes very obvious what you should do when you're dealing with it because, when they're under the gun, you'll see people, you'll see their skills fall apart and, when they're strong at something, you'll see them rise to that occasion. Someone who's high in stress tolerance, they're never really bothered when it's under a deadline or crisis or a troubleshooting situation; they just thrive on that sort of thing. Someone who's low in that, they just fall apart, and that's what it is. It's how your brain is wired.

Rachel Salaman: Another scientific concept you talk about in the book is cognitive bandwidth.

Chuck Martin: Yes, people can, what's called exceed their cognitive bandwidth. If someone's process – is taking in a lot of information, as everyone in business is today, they're taking in a lot of information at the same time and they're trying to handle all the information of equal importance, what happens is, over a period of time when they keep getting barraged with this information, their executive skills actually break down. They exceed their cognitive bandwidth, as much as the frontal lobes can handle, and one after the other the 12 skills fail. I mean, it's like a meltdown, and this is where a person, you'll see a person at work and they'll say, "I need to get out. I need to go walk around the block." They have basically exceeded their cognitive bandwidth. They can no longer manage or function in terms of focus, time management, organization; planning and they just lose all of it. They need to go out, but the good news is, by taking just a walk around the block, by taking a breather, your frontal lobes and your executive skills do in fact recharge and reset themselves, so you can get going again in very short order. You just need to take a break. So when people feel like they're really overloaded, they're just going to explode, it's a cognitive function area; it's exceeding cognitive bandwidth and it's a very real thing in terms of how neurons are firing in the brain and they're basically saying, "Enough," and it just shuts it down on you.

Rachel Salaman: How does having that knowledge help you?

Chuck Martin: Well, what happens is you start to see it happening. If you know your weakest skills and your stronger skills, your weakest skills will start to go and, if you don't need those skills that's okay, but when you start to see more and more of your skills falling apart, we say, "Boy, I can't concentrate. I can't focus on this. I don't know where to start," so you've lost your focus and you've lost your planning prioritization. "I'm losing all track of when I can get things done," you've lost your time management. "I'm not sure how to do this better," you've lost your observation. "I'm feeling really more stressed," you've lost your stress tolerance. There are five feelings right there, so you know and you start to see it going. And, typically, other people see it in you first where they'll see you falling apart. Like, in the publishing company that the American Management Association is publishing, or published my book, and they will say, "Oh, so and so," they'll say, "stay away from her right now; we're on deadline, she's really low in stress tolerance." And that's – it changes the language inside an organization, so, you see it and you know it and, once you know it, you'll start to observe it all over the place and you can actually see a lot of these skills if you go to a huge superstore. Like, in the US we have the Walmart superstores, which are – I mean, they're city blocks long and you can actually watch executive skills in action and you can see at checkout, when someone's low in self-restraint someone will start talking to a total stranger and they just blurt things out to a total stranger. That's low self-restraint. If you're low in focus, you go into a store and you expect that you're going to be in there for 15 minutes and you just lose focus and you're just kind of wandering around looking at things, like wow, this is really interesting. You can do the same thing at, you know, the Harrods of the world, it doesn't matter. If you know what your time management, if you're low in time management, you go in and you misjudge shopping by an hour or two, very easily. If you're low in working memory, you actually forget to go to the store on the way home, so that one's easy. But you can see this in everyday life because your brain is your brain; it goes everywhere you go and these cognitive functions or executive skills are in – they're running in people 24 hours a day, so it's fascinating to watch, once you know about it.

Rachel Salaman: Chuck Martin, thank you very much for joining us today.

Chuck Martin: Oh, a pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: Chuck's book, SMARTS (Are We Hardwired for Success?) is published by AMACOM. It's packed with useful tools and practical tips and, despite its scientific content it's a very easy read.

I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.