put another way, are you a box or a funnel?
by bill reeb
a college professor i know has had a difficult time harmonizing as his approach always escalated to clashing and resisting. and no, this isn’t a story about michaelle in disguise, but someone else i had the pleasure of getting to know.
more: rely on strengths … but not too much | increase your odds of success | heading off course? time to correct | don’t let time pass without … | is your sense of duty misplaced? | are you sure you’re in the wrong place? | how are you programming your mind?
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he had a definite approach to teaching and was good at it. he believed in setting very high standards for his students and passing only those who achieved a specific level of excellence.
in almost any school, this value system would be praised. the problem didn’t arise from his philosophy, but from that professor’s rigidity as to how to apply it. for example, to him, this high standard was best demonstrated through the completion of vast amounts of homework, no grading curve based on class results, and strict class policies. these tactics alienated a large portion of his students. the school, while supportive of maintaining high standards, also had a value system that believed the customer (the student) should be nurtured and satisfied with his or her education. so, it is easy to see the clash forming as the university would compare the professor’s performance against the students’ evaluations of him.
the university confronted the professor and asked for a compromise in his teaching tactics. the professor, rigid in his thinking, responded something to the effect of, “the way i teach my classes is fine. if you would recruit better students, they wouldn’t have such a difficult time making good grades.”
as you can imagine, that attitude did not go over well. but, the real problem was that no one was happy with this situation. not only was the university upset with the professor, but the professor was miserable because he was constantly choosing a path of clashing and resisting rather than harmonizing and responding. the professor lost sight of his job, which was to work for the university to achieve its goals. he also lost sight of an even more important fundamental, which is that there are an abundance of quality approaches to teaching that would still deliver the high standards he set and would also provide the more positive and nurturing environment that the students and university desired.
the professor got caught up in his way being the “right way,” and because he couldn’t let go of that, any other way had to be the “wrong way.”
this reminds me of numerous coaching sessions i have had with a variety of cfos over the years. business requirements, and the work to comply with those standards, have steadily increased over the past few decades. as well, the need to reduce overhead costs in order for companies to run leaner has progressively amplified during this same period. it is no wonder the cfos, who are typically in charge of accounting, technology and sometimes operations, are under pressure to do more every day with less.
the problem that arises stems from clashing and resisting instead of harmonizing and responding. for example, instead of trying to understand the needs of the executive management group and trying to find alternatives that would work, when approached with additional requirements, the cfos would often simply respond with, “we can’t do that,” or “that is impossible to do.”
the fact is … if the management team was unwilling to bend on their requirements, and unwilling to change the resources being allocated, and unwilling to change the existing outputs expected, then the cfos were likely correct in their statements given that they were probably operating lean to begin with. but i have been around those situations for a long, long time and only in very rare circumstances were the management teams this unreasonable. in the very few circumstances when i found an unreasonable management team, my advice to the cfo was run! but back to our topic, here is the advice i have given hundreds of times:
don’t be a box! become a funnel!
i then followed that statement with something like this:
anytime your boss asks you to add something significant to your list of duties, don’t just thoughtlessly pile it into your box as if you are being asked to make another sacrifice to keep your job. take time to
- understand the new request,
- create a list of the outputs you currently produce or activities that require substantial time,
- consider the time required for each of those projects or processes,
- prioritize them,
- match them against the resources you have,
- determine what resource changes you would need in order to complete all the work assigned, and
- identify projects and processes that you could either hand off to other people or groups or stop doing
in the case of the cfos, once the analysis is done, they are in a position to sit down with the management team (which they are normally part of in the first place) and review the various alternatives that would facilitate the completion of the newly assigned tasks. once the review is done as outlined above, the solution typically comes down to either a choice of growing the box (the company providing more resources to the cfo in the form of money, people, technology and so forth), or allowing some less important work to fall out of the bottom of the box (doing away with the work or shifting it to another department).
i regularly tell my clients that they need to shift their mindsets from being a box to becoming a funnel (instead of letting everything pile up and loading them down, look for the least important stuff and let it slide out the bottom). both alternatives – receiving additional resources or cutting out other less valuable work – are good for the cfo.
the only alternative that is bad for the career of the cfo is the instinctive reply of “no, we can’t do that!” and what drives that philosophical approach is the rigidity that overachievers have to defaulting to being a fixed-sized box.
thinking you are a box that doesn’t have room for one more idea or objective is about resistance and clashing. thinking you are a funnel and always considering other ideas or objectives and then – if the priority is high enough – determining what should be let go of or fall through the bottom is an example of harmonizing.
the rigidity of the professor’s thinking that his way was the only good way to meet the high standard requirement he desired was about clashing and putting up barriers between him and the school. taking a harmonizing approach to solve this problem would start with looking for common ground between the professor’s objective of maintaining high standards while simultaneously meeting the university’s requirement of developing a satisfied and nurtured student body. unfortunately, in the case of the professor, this was not the end that occurred. the professor maintained his rigidity and lost sight of the fact that he was working for the university, not the other way around. as would be expected, that professor has moved on, not because the university wanted to run him off, but rather because the professor wanted to clash his way to his desired outcome.
harmonizing instead of clashing can help you work better and find success or happiness more quickly.
as you move from thinking you are a fixed-sized box to either a funnel or an expandable box, you will see requests and change as opportunity rather than oppression. when you adopt harmonization as your baseline approach, you will find that you create far less chaos and you are much better able to leverage the existing momentum around you to your advantage.
assess yourself on whether you default to harmonizing, or instead clashing and resisting. circle how you feel you are doing. on this subject, i:
- need a lot of work
- need a little work
- am okay
- feel good where i am
in what areas of my life have i become a box and need to learn to become a funnel?
in what aspects of my life am i interacting with rigidity rather than with harmony in mind?