Posts Tagged ‘Mike Figliuolo’

A Self-Exam on One Piece of Paper October 14 2011 18262 responseshttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F2011%2F10%2Fa-self-exam-on-one-piece-of-paper.htmlA+Self-Exam+on+One+Piece+of+Paper2011-10-14+14%3A13%3A55Scott+Eblinhttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F%3Fp%3D1826

One of the many intelligent things that Socrates said is “An unexamined life is not worth living.” In an era when many professionals are running flat out until they crash, taking time for self examination usually ends up falling into the category of important but not urgent. The downside of that, of course, is that the urgent things end up overwhelming the important things that a little bit of self examination might have identified.

Fortunately, Mike Figliuolo has come up with a simple yet powerful approach to self examination in his new book, One Piece of Paper. The big idea is to boil your personal philosophy on four basic aspects of leadership down to one piece of paper. Mike offers a series of questions and exercises to help you do that. One of his core tools is what he calls the maxim. The maxim is a simple idea that you hold in your head to remind yourself of how to act. An example that Mike offers is “What would my grandmother say?” (As I wrote earlier this year, that question also worked for Tim Sanders.)

To give you an idea of how Mike’s approach works in real life, I’ve considered a few of his questions in the aspect of Leading Yourself and will share my one piece of paper (less than that actually) answers with you:

Why All the Leaders Are Above Average October 5 2011 1688no responseshttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F2011%2F10%2Fwhy-all-the-leaders-are-above-average.htmlWhy+All+the+Leaders+Are+Above+Average2011-10-05+14%3A27%3A47Scott+Eblinhttp%3A%2F%2Feblingroup.com%2F%3Fp%3D1688

My friends at SmartBrief on Leadership run a weekly poll on a question of interest to their 165,000 readers. A great guy named Mike Figliuolo, author of the just released One Piece of Paper, comes up with the questions and offers his analysis on the results. This week’s write up was a doozy.

Last week, Mike asked, “How do you think people would rate you as a leader?” with the choices being average, above average, below average, best leader they’ve ever had or they think I’m a terrible leader. It turns out that 74% of the respondents think they’re either above average or the best leader their people have ever had. How is this possible?

A lot of these leaders may be suffering from what social psychologists call illusory superiority. It’s the same phenomenon that led 68% of the faculty at the University of Nebraska to rate themselves in the top 25% of teaching ability or why 93% of U.S. drivers put themselves in the top 50% of driving ability. It might have something to do with why so many companies use peer benchmarking to pay their CEO’s at the 75th percentile or above. It might have been why former Dunder-Mifflin Scranton office manager, Michael Scott, thought he was so hilariously funny.

Is it possible that you are prone to illusory superiority? Given the stats, the odds are pretty good that you might be. (Me too, for that matter.) So, what can you do to give yourself a better chance of being a reality based leader? Here are four ideas: