How to Inspire … (Part II)
Be the First
It‘s hard to think about being an inspiring influence – that sounds so beyond most of us. We enjoy leading relatively quiet lives. We don’t like to stand out. However, an inspired performance is within each one of us.
As a pioneering court reporter utilizing Computer-Assisted Transcription (CAT) in 1970, as I was, or as a voice writer implementing voice recognition software today, as my friend Nancy Trueheart is, or as a sales person developing a new way of interacting with customers and focusing on their needs through Silent Marketing, we find ourselves as forces of inspiration. Sometimes it’s because we are among the first to use new technology. Sometimes we inspire others as a result of a position we take on an issue and our courage in expressing it. Sometimes we inspire others because we are willing to change and adopt new methods of performance. It is not always easy being the first because often that involves change, and most of us fear change. But notice how quickly we adapt to change after someone takes the lead as a result of their inspired performance.
Change is good for one reason: because it leads us to the next thing. It usually is a sign of progress. Early in my career as a court reporter I produced one thing, and that was a typewritten verbatim transcript of a legal proceeding. Today I produce a multimedia product including text, audio and video. Here is how it developed:
In the late 1960s, when I began my career, people told me that I‘d soon be out of a job as tape recorders replaced stenographers. In the 1970s with the introduction of computerization, I was told that I‘d be out of a job as computers would soon be able to recognize speech and instantly transcribe it. In the 1980s, I was told videotape was the wave of the future in litigation. My heavens! Not only could one hear a witness testify, but one could also see the witness! What everyone forgot was that litigators prefer paper – they need to read testimony! So do courts of appeal.
In the 1990s, I was told that digital recording was the solution. Digital is better than analog. It experiences no generation loss. The fifth copy of a digital recording is as clear as the original. Every party to a case would be able to receive an instant audio copy of a proceeding. Now my career was over for sure. In this new century, I‘m being told that speech recognition software is going to provide stiff competition to court reporters and in the future it will replace us.
That’s nearly 40 years of threats to my livelihood. And I remember when I was starting out court reporters of that era would tell me that since 1949, the year of my birth, court reporters were being threatened with replacement.
Can you see what the experts left out of the equation as they forecast our demise to technology? They simply dismissed the drivers of the technology. They discounted people! They overlooked the strength of the individual. They underrated the powerful inspiration an individual brings to a job. Technology does not work without people. And there is always room for inspired people. Inspired people came along who married work to technology and thereby enhanced the value of a skilled professional court reporter. By simply having the courage to be the first our inspired performance inspires others to grow along with us.
The Community Connection
While our performance is individualized, a community will inspire it. Let me tell you what I mean. Not too long ago, I listened to a presentation by Margaret Wheatley.
Dr. Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, and she received a Master‘s degree in systems thinking from New York University. She sees people in an organization as the blessing, not the problem. She says that life and work are about relationships in the context of community. Dr. Wheatley has tested her ideas and her perceptions in many different settings and cultures.
We must think about what we see in our world today and acknowledge how we treat each other. Then consider this: the people of the West African country of Senegal live in Third World poverty. The conditions in which they live are dreadful. But remarkably, in all of this sadness and hardship they do not experience suicide. When asked how this is possible, their simple answer is, “We take care of each other. No one lives alone.”
During Dr. Wheatley‘s presentation, she displayed photos of Senegalese citizens gathered in small groups. These people told her that in their culture if someone is hungry, without a place to live, or in need of clothing, a community of friends comes to their assistance with food, shelter, clothing, and anything else they need. They help them to get back on their feet. Every person in Senegal knows that he or she is valued.
No living creature lives alone. As people we always live in relationships with other people and/or with an idea and/or with a moment in time.
Cultural forces influence people. Some people believe that the violent nature of movies and video games tend to make us more violent as a culture. Some people believe that we live in a culture whose values are corrupt and getting worse. Other people believe that we are creative and hard-working as a culture. Consequently, those cultural forces influence what we do in our relationships with another person, with our ideas and with our moments in time. In other words, our relationships dictate what our behavior will be.
If I put this in terms of how it applies to what I do, then I and all court reporters have a relationship with the judicial system. Our job is to be as good at what we are hired to do as we can possibly be. When our services are required, it is our responsibility to respond. We agree to reply by a certain date. Based on our representation, other actions are planned, and people’s schedules are set. Everyone involved is focused on a moment in time; the court reporter is the object of their focus. If I perform, the relationship to that moment in time is in synch. If I fail to perform, the relationship to that moment in time falls apart. In other words, if the transcript is not filed with the clerk when it is due, briefing schedules, court dates and related matters have to be rescheduled, down to and including personal and family plans. Nothing living lives alone, you see. We depend on each other to perform responsibly.
Looking back on life and career, many people realize that things would have been easier had they been a better student, gone to college, started to build positive communities surrounding their interests earlier. To make those things happen, of course, one needs to have a strong support system early in life and throughout life. Early in life we need family members to help us establish a positive foundation of values and self-esteem. Then we need family members, teachers and mentors, uplifting friends, to act as role models for us. And as we move into our adult years we need to build communities of friends and acquaintances whom we can count on — and who can count on us — as we need each other for various reasons. Most importantly, we have to be receptive to learning and then be prepared to act on what we learn.
Making mistakes is part of life and mistakes represent much of our education. Whoever it was that said that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes was right on. As painful and sometimes embarrassing as it was to live through the consequences of my mistakes, I am today very grateful for them. What I learned from my mistakes gave me the confidence to inspire my performance and to improve my results. Education is important because it makes you self-reliant. It gives you confidence. Education enables you to make better decisions.
It is fascinating for me to look back on my failures. I can see where impatience and lack of emotional discipline resulted in poor judgment. I see time after time where my lack of a college education with its benefits academic and social, and my unwillingness to sacrifice in the short term, resulted in missed opportunities. I can see where my period of spiritual malaise unsettled me. There is a road map for life; for me it emphasizes a conservative and thoughtful path. When we deviate too far from the path is when we begin to drift into trouble and lose our inspiration.
I listen to my inner voice now, after years of ignoring it and bending to my emotions. In his book entitled Integrity, Dr. Henry Cloud calls his “voice” the cringe factor. Dr. Cloud writes that the cringe factor is the big gulp you would have to take to go forward with any significant event in your life. He recalled so many situations where he had gone forward ignoring problem areas about a person or a business deal but took the big gulp only to have the big throw-up later. Trust your instincts is another way of saying listen to your inner voice.
Community is complex because people are complex. Fortunately, there are a variety of communities and the likelihood is good that you will be able to find a community of interest that matches your needs. If you are unable to find such a community, go ahead and start one. The key to a community is that it inspires you to be your best, and that it inspires you to contribute your best back to it.
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The Steps
Is there a formula for achieving an inspired performance? Yes. The formula is:
Prepare to Serve;
Before you Begin, you Commit;
Carefully Select your Customers or your Employers;
Fight for Every Detail;
Avoid Negative People.
Prepare to Serve
Serving others presupposes that the person being served is worthy of your effort. On a purely human level, every person whom you serve is worthy because we are created equal in the eyes of the Creator and it is our responsibility to care for one another. From a business perspective, additional factors must be considered. Remember what Dr. Cloud said about the “cringe factor”in the previous chapter. In preparing to serve, it is necessary to first develop your knowledge base and your skills to your highest ability, and to maintain them at a high level. Service is meaningless without high quality inspired performance. Next determine your brand. In other words, what do you want a customer or an employer to think about you? When we see the Coke Cola brand, the company wants us to think refreshing. McDonald‘s distinctive golden arches brand is recognizable all over the world and its message is one of consistency. My personal brand is responsive. When my customers see me I want them to think Al always delivers.
Attitude is the final aspect of preparing to serve. A good attitude leads to hard work. Before You Begin. Before entering a business meeting remind yourself that whatever happens from this point forward will be positive, no matter what. People enjoy working with cooperative, engaging, competent, inspired people.
When you enter your place of employment every day, smile and commit to yourself that every interaction you have today is going to be a positive one. Sir Isaac Newton‘s third law of physics is that every action has a reaction. You have surely noticed that when you get angry with someone, they tend to get angry back. When you smile at someone, they tend to smile back.
Here is an example. I arrived at a client‘s office one day and the secretary came out and walked me to the conference room so that I could set up my equipment. I set up my stenograph machine and my two computers, taped down the cables, got out my paperwork, and began to prepare. Within a few minutes the secretary returned to the conference room with a look of panic on her face. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Then she said, “I‘m so sorry. I have put you in the wrong conference room. We have to move.”
I thought I noticed her shoulders slumping as she prepared to hear my reply. I said to her, “Oh, Kathy, I‘m so glad to hear you say that. Between you and me, this is not my favorite conference room. Where are we going next?”
I watched as the color returned to her face and a smile returned to her lips. She was so relieved. Do you think she‘ll remember that brief encounter? You bet! This is just a little reminder that when you smile and focus on maintaining a positive energy before you enter the arena, you will pay big dividends to all concerned.
Carefully Select Your Clients
In the real estate business decisions are often based on location. Oil companies locate service stations at the corner of a busy intersection. Why? Because that‘s where the vehicles are. Location, location, location. Why did Willie Sutton say he robbed banks? “Because that‘s where the money is.”
Carefully select your clients and/or employers. In 1997 I found myself in a position where I had to re-inspire my business life. I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to do. I discussed it with my family. Here‘s what we agreed:
We wanted to work with people whom we liked and respected and who liked and respected us; we wanted to pursue high quality assignments; we wanted to provide a high level of service; we wanted the work to be profitable.
We have been successful in every regard.
I share this information to illustrate for you that you can have your ideal situation if you inspire your performance. This does not just apply to court reporting. It can apply to any profession, whether you are a school teacher, a bus driver, or an accountant. We inspired our performance by identifying the profile of our ideal client; we found those clients, and acquired their business. That made it easy to inspire step three, which was to service them really well.
Remember I said that we wanted to work with people that we liked and respected? One of our reporters made this comment to me after spending the day with one of our favorite clients: ”Al,” she said, ―”I love working with your clients; they‘re just like you.” That singular comment is the best business comment that I have heard in the last 10 years because it says everything about what we set out to do in 1997. I didn‘t realize it until then, but what we set out to do was to find clients to work with who shared the same professional and personal values that we did.
You will get back what you put out into the world.
Fight for Every Detail
You want to fight for every detail in your work. A partner in a large regional law firm travels throughout the country for the purpose of taking depositions. He confided in me one day that he is a fanatic about preparation. What drives him to prepare so hard is his fear that he might miss something that will cost his client to lose a case. At lunch one day he and I and another friend were discussing transcript quality issues when he said this to me: ―”Al, I prepare sometimes for days and weeks to take a deposition. I fly to the location of the deposition, spend a couple of nights in a hotel, take the deposition for several hours over a couple of days searching for maybe two nuggets of information that might help my case. That‘s all. Just two little pieces of information. Do you know that I never know until I return to my office and receive the transcript whether I had a good reporter or not, whether those two nuggets I prepared so hard to get are there or not? As soon as I get the transcript, I thumb through it looking for key words that I know that I said, key questions that I know that I asked, key answers that I know the witness gave. I can tell by just a brief thumbing through the transcript whether I had a good reporter or not.”
Can you imagine living with that anxiety over and over? Whether you are a new professional or an experienced professional, you know the importance of fighting for every detail. That‘s why we‘re there.
Avoid Negative People
Negative people absorb your energy. Their attitude will influence your behavior unless you are emotionally and intellectually strong and aware. For example, it is easy to fall into a pattern of complaining about situations. We all do it or have done it. But I ask you to remember this: Whatever you focus on you will attract more of. If you fall into a pattern of complaining about life, you will attract more things to complain about.
Set a good example for negative people, try to help them, but protect your attitude. I enjoy experiencing life and working hard. As Woody Allen famously said, 90 percent of success in life is just in showing up. If you show up and pay attention, you will learn so much about how life works. That‘s a topic for another day, but the point is that your attitude is something to be developed and protected. Remaining positive and pleasant is, I think, good advice.
You Are a Part of Something Bigger
The pressures of daily life, and particularly of the workplace, can be daunting and people do get their spirits crushed by uninspired co-workers and by uninspired administrators and others. Consider this staggering statistic: 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. In other words, they show up, do the minimum required, and offer no creativity to their employer. It’s the pressure of everyday living that leads to this disengagement. Those who are disengaged have less patience, they suffer more anxiety, they feel a loss of meaning in their lives, and they are lonely. Why? Most likely it is the result of a lack of community support. By that I mean employees may share their ideas with co-workers and supervisors, but occasionally someone will be ignored or ridiculed. When it happens too often, the wind is taken out of their sails and they are embarrassed. If they are emotionally weak, then the result is that they stop participating and perhaps even stop communicating.
When we inspire our lives and inspire our jobs, we also inspire the members of our communities. One follows the other. We sometimes forget that the people we are serving are part of our larger community. If we frustrate them with inadequate service, then there‘s a trickle down effect to our actions. The customer has to find an outlet for their frustration and sometimes that impacts the customer‘s own community. With every action comes a reaction, and we – you and me – can impact the action positively by inspiring our actions in a positive way. In other words, by being uplifting in our reactions to people.
It has taken me many years of experience in the workplace, lots of study, and the wisdom that comes with age to fully appreciate what Dr. Wheatley was talking about in her presentation on community. I‘d like to share with you an experience that I had a number of years ago that would have had a better result had I known then what I know now.
In the 1980s, the Maryland judiciary announced a plan to introduce a pilot video program as a possible replacement for their stenographic system of making the record. The focus of the pilot program was the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, which for years had a terrible appellate record. Appellate delays were placed at the doorstep of alleged poor performance of court reporters. In reality, some of it was due to poor performance and some of it was due to poor management.
At that time, I was the President of the Maryland Court Reporters Association. At the direction of the members of the MCRA, we formulated a plan to fight the decision to implement the pilot program. Well, I got into a terrible public battle with the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. It got so bad that the Maryland Court of Appeals interceded and called us to Annapolis for a hearing on the matter. I‘ll never forget what the Chief Judge said to me privately during that hearing. He said, ―”Al, I have nothing against stenographers. I would love to have a courthouse full of computerized court reporters. But we can‘t find them. We have been searching for years. The ones that we do bring in can‘t or won‘t do the job. I‘ve got a courthouse to run and a record to preserve. I have no choice.”
That happened 23 years ago. In the time since that hearing, the Circuit Courts of Maryland employ a mixture of stenotypists, voicewriters, direct tape recording, and videotape. When the parties to a case want to bring in their own court reporters, the Court gladly permits that.
Had I been smarter back then and understood that we are a community and that no one lives alone in that community, I would have recognized the opportunity that had been placed before us. A community member was crying out for help. Instead of offering a viable solution, instead of working to protect the interests of our community, we stood by protecting our turf. Inspired performance is what was needed at that moment, and I missed it.
People make the difference every time. It does not matter how computerized your workplace is. It does not matter how much technology becomes available. What matters is that in every interaction a real human being is present. It is these human beings, when they inspire their performances, who encourage an inspired performance from others. It is these human beings that truly help their community, that recognize they are a part of their community.
Search out your community. Chances are you will belong to more than one community. Your profession is only one of these. You will have a family as well as other communities. One woman I know has her family, her professional community, her homeschooling community, her local food co-operative community, her church community, and her parenting community. She strives to inspire her performance in each of these communities because she wants to make a difference in the lives of the people she knows and in the lives of the people who are affected by her decisions as a person and a consumer.