Hashtags, Hash Marks, and a Hack for Human Behavior
How to Use the IFTTT Formula to Become a Better Leader
It is bar none the craziest thing that has ever happened to me in a sales meeting.
I asked one of my top reps to make a presentation to the rest of the team on setting SMART goals. You know the acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Everyone knows the acronym, right?
No, not everyone. As in this particular sales rep.
He stood up in front of the group and said these exact words, “I’ve set a lot of stupid goals in my life.”
“For example, I once had a goal to be able to light a cigarette, put it on the edge of a beer can, flip it off the can, and catch it in my mouth filter first.”
He demonstrated this goal by performing the feat for all of us, wrapping up his brief talk by saying, “Don’t set stupid goals. Set smart goals.”
I kid you not, this actually happened! I broke the stunned silence with a real, albeit impromptu, presentation on goal setting.
You know what was in that presentation, and you know how important it is—especially in sales—to set specific, measurable targets, targets that are achievable and relevant to overall business objectives with clear time-bound deadlines.
But there’s another kind of goal setting you can use to help you be your best, a hack for human behavior that very few leaders actually implement: IFTTT goals
What’s an IFTTT Goal?
Computer geeks reading this article will instantly recognize IFTTT as an acronym that stands for IF This, Then That. The most notable example of IFTTT is social media’s use of hashtags. If you place a hashtag in front of a set of words on a social media site, then that set of words will be aggregated as a topic on the site. When an overwhelming amount of the same set of words with a hashtag is used on any social site, that topic is considered to be trending.
Go to LinkedIn. Type in #billzipp in the search bar, and the posts I've shared on LinkedIn with #billzipp will appear. The IF This is the hashtag with my name, and the Then That is the search results. Currently, however, #billzipp is not trending on LinkedIn. So very sad.
How does this become a hack for human behavior? Here’s an example from my own leadership journey.
Hash Marks on a Piece of Paper
Some years ago, I realized that I tended to dominate discussion in the group meetings I attended. I always had something to say about most any topic on the table. Blessed with a personality—or cursed, depending on your point of view—that speaks up freely. That’s what I did. All too freely.
The behavior I wanted to embody in meetings was a leader who listens as well as speaks. More specifically, I wanted to be a leader who listens first, actively and attentively, before speaking. So here’s the human hack I devised for myself. Whenever I was in a group meeting, I made hash marks on a piece of paper of things that popped into my mind to say. I would not open my mouth to say anything in that meeting until I accumulated five hash marks. And I made five more hash marks before saying the next thing, repeating this process throughout the meeting.
What this hack did was help me embody a behavior I wanted to be true about my presence in meetings. It forced me to really listen to other people in the room, and when it was time to talk make what I shared meaningful because there’d be another five hash marks before I’d get to say something else. In short, it helped me to become quick to hear and slow to speak as a leader.
The IF This that occurred for my participation in meetings was five hash marks on a piece of paper. The Then That was more active listening on my part and more meaningful participation in the discussion. This behavior in meetings has become mostly automatic, that’s the aim of an IFTTT goal, but occasionally I catch myself talking too much. What do I do? I go back to making hash marks on a piece of paper.
For behavioral development, this method is vastly superior than setting a goal to listen more in meetings. “We’ve learned from more than 200 studies that if-then planners are about 300 percent more likely than others to reach their goals,” social scientist Heidi Grant Halvorson reports. Here’s the reason why:
“If-then plans work because contingencies are built into our neurological wiring. Humans are very good at encoding information in ‘If x, then y’ terms and using those connections (often unconsciously) to guide their behavior,” Halvorson continues in her Harvard Business Review article on the subject. “When people decide exactly when, where, and how they will fulfill their goals, they create a link in their brains between a certain situation or cue (‘If or when x happens’) and the behavior that should follow (‘then I will do y’). In this way, they establish powerful triggers for action.”
Setting IFTTT Goals
In coaching executive leaders, I’ve found that they’re brilliant at setting and achieving SMART goals. It’s why they were promoted to executive leadership in the first place. But the concept of IFTTT goals is totally foreign to them. Even worse, the greater visibility of the executive role reveals gaps in their leadership—like dominating discussion in group meetings—sabotaging the ability to actually fulfill their SMART goals.
So in our work together, in addition to performance goals, we also focus on development goals. A development goal is a specific behavior a leader needs to embody, repeated over and over again until that behavior becomes automatic. This kind of goal is set using the IFTTT formula discussed above and demonstrated in the following graphic:
These are three simple but challenging leadership communication IFTTT goals. The first having to do with listening to opposing points of view; the second having to do with answering a question with a question instead of an immediate answer, and the third having to do with not jumping to confusions.
In working with my executive coaching clients, they set a behavioral goal like one of these for a series of weeks and track how many times they did (or did not) complete it. We then discuss progress and recalibrate the goal if needed. Ultimately what takes place, and this is the end game for any IFTTT goal, is these positive, productive behaviors becoming ingrained habits, part of the fabric of their character.
Hashtags, hash marks, and a hack for human behavior. What’s an IFTTT goal you can set this week? Be specific, measurable, and achievable as you would with a SMART goal, but set the time frame for it with an IFTTT scenario. And please, don’t have it be anything to do with flipping a cigarette off a beer can into your mouth. Okay?
Number One in Leadership Training!
The last two weeks have been pretty exciting! The Kindle version of my book, The Ultimate Sales Manager Playbook, became a #1 New Release in Leadership Training on Amazon.
A BIG thank you to everyone who helped make this possible.
What’s that you say? You weren’t able to pick up your Kindle version last week? No worries! Just follow the link below, and it can be yours.
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Photo Courtesy of marfis75 on Flickr via Compfight