Juice. Brady G. Wilson
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you think you might encounter.” Managers address bottlenecks at that time or in the next-level huddle. Managers also ask each individual if he or she completed yesterday’s number one goal.
By identifying what an employee can accomplish today, and what an employee accomplished yesterday, quarterly goals break into doable chunks. “It’s a great exchange of information and sharing time. Sometimes people will get into a side discussion that turns out to be critical,” says Debbie Featherston, vice president of PeopleWerks – Celebrations and Communications.
What Are We Really Saying Here?
• It is the release of intelligent energy that produces results for your organization.
• By pulling first, it’s possible to achieve in two days what you couldn’t achieve in two years of pushing.
• Conversation is the operating system that energizes and runs all of your other systems.
• When trying to get people to buy in, invest time and pull out their reality before pulling them into your reality.
Want to Make This Happen?
• Create your company’s Red Room.
• Get your supervisors creating more human moments with their employees.
• Get your leaders pulling out the realities of their leadership teams to help them get on the hook for results.
• Ensure that face-to-face Pull Conversations are integrated with the systems you have already invested in (Balanced Score Card, 360° Measurement, Performance Review, Wellness Program).
• Implement fifteen-minute huddle relays.
Juice at Home
Marked for Life
My dad contracted bone cancer when I was thirty-nine.
As he was lying on what turned out to be his deathbed, he turned to me and talked about how close death was beside him.
For all kinds of reasons that would take up too much space and time to describe, I could never really understand that my dad loved me or was proud of me. He had a hard time conveying his feelings and I had a hard time believing I was lovable or worthy of his pride. I spent many frustrating years trying to win his approval; I even ended up following in his footsteps into the optical industry (he was an optometrist).
I had never invested intelligent energy to understand my dad’s reality. But as I sat beside him in those moments, there was something inside me that wanted to pull out all the understanding I could. I was a thirty-nine-year-old vacuum that needed filling in a very big way.
I began to pull out his reality. I asked him how the pain was. I asked him what it was like to be so close to death. I asked him if he was afraid. His lip quivered and he nodded, saying, “Who in their right mind would think they’re good enough to get into God’s heaven?” After a pause, he added, “But I have faith.” He looked at me and said, “You have to have faith.”
It wasn’t those words that marked me for life. I knew that faith in God was crucial. It was the words that came next.
“I love you and I’m proud of you,” he said.
These weighty words landed on a soft heart and made a deep imprint. In a moment of instant clarity, I was vaulted from twisted perceptions to reality, from misunderstanding to understanding, from self-doubt to confidence, and from “I feel like a failure” to “Maybe I can succeed.”
How did that moment happen? The dynamic of my need to understand and his need to be understood caused us to turn together. I turned toward my dad and pulled out his reality. He turned toward me and pushed out his reality. Turning together created a life-changing conversation. (Interestingly enough, the word conversation means just that: to turn together.)
But we went beyond just turning together. In this brief moment we stepped into each other’s worlds and experienced each other’s realities. When I stepped into my dad’s world, I felt what he felt: “This is my last chance to let my son know that I love him and I’m proud of him.” As for me, feeling this reality for the first time recalibrated my beliefs: faulty beliefs were replaced with reliable ones. As Dad stepped into my world, he could see that I was finally getting what he wanted to give me all along – a sense of his love and blessing. Seeing each other’s realities made the way for a Bigger Reality to emerge.
Unity is one of the primary goals of communication. If you separate the word communication and put it together from back to front, you come up with a definition that goes like this: communication is the action of becoming one with. If that definition is accurate, it’s easy to see why conversation is so vital to communication. It’s only in turning together that we can become one with another person. In those moments of deep communication, I finally felt one with my dad.
Unity is one of the primary goals of communication.
This pivotal conversation released juice inside me: an intelligent energy that came from having some of my deepest needs met. An energy that came from the belief that I could finally become successful – that I was worthy of my dad’s pride. That energy still empowers and juices me today, nearly a decade later.
Take your complimentary Conversation Assessment – go to www.juiceinc.com and click on “Conversation Assessment”
Creating Capacity in Your Listeners
We have just seen how conversation releases energy. But only a certain kind of conversation does so: Pull Conversations. We witnessed how these conversations produced a dramatic turnaround in David’s UK marketing team. Now it’s time to unpack how and why Pull Conversations work. Let’s take a look at the logic of Pull.
Push or Pull?
Every July I return to Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron to the cottage where I spent the summers of my youth. It’s not all fun and games up north. Last year we had to replace the wiring between two of the cottages. Because the new wire was going to be buried, the job entailed running a thick electrical wire through a plastic hose that would protect the wire underground.
How to get 140 feet of wire through 140 feet of plastic hose – that was the challenge. Mike, the hardware store guy, had offered some advice, but it seemed far-fetched and much too time-consuming. My brother Tim and I decided to try what we thought would be a faster and easier method.
First, we uncoiled the wire and stretched it out in a straight line along the beach. Then we tried pushing the wire through the hose. What we thought would be a relatively simple process proved futile. Although the wire was stiff, the friction proved to be too much, getting things to the point where we could no longer push the wire at all.
What to do next? We thought of taking the wire and the hose and hanging them over the edge of nearby East Bluff. Maybe gravity would overcome the friction and the wire would slowly fall through the hose. But it would take a lot of work to roll up the wire and the hose, drive it up to the bluff, unroll it over the edge, slide the wire through the hose (which we weren’t sure would work), roll the hose back up, and drive it back to the lake.
Mike the hardware guy’s method was beginning to look more and more attractive, despite the fact that it would require significant up-front work.
Tim took a little piece of a plastic bag and tied a roll of fishing line onto it. I stuck the piece of plastic bag into one end of the hose and Tim went to the other end and stuck a small vacuum cleaner over the end. He turned on the vacuum cleaner and before we knew it, the suction had pulled the fishing line through the hose and to his end.
We then used the fishing line