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Yan Wang, the former CFO of VitalSmarts, didnt survive Maos China by taking outlandish risks such
as questioning those in positions of authority. As our CFO, she did impeccable work with the highest
ethical standards. But challenging the status quo was deeply unsettling to her especially if it
meant critiquing the actions of one of our company owners.
She was literally trembling one day when she suggested to my colleague Al that the few dollars he
was bringing home from selling copies of our book at public events was hardly worth the time it took
our accounting team to process them. She fumbled around the issue until Al said, So what are you
suggesting I do, Yan? She gulped an enormous amount of air and nally confessed, It would be
smarter to just give them away. Al agreed. Yan was almost always right. It just took a while to gure
out what her opinion was.
YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES Fast-forward a decade. Our company had grown
Improving Yourself tenfold, and so had Yan. She had become the
backbone of accountability in our company. No
one, including major shareholders, was o-limits
when it came to maintaining standards and
creating a culture of scal stewardship. Her team
was at the forefront of identifying ways to
maximize our margins.
Yan became aware that her crucial moment was when she felt a need to disagree with someone with
greater organizational power. She was pretty blunt with peers and direct reports, but speaking up to
the owners of the company contradicted every instinct. She felt encouraged when sherealized that
she didntstruggle with candor in general only in thosespecic circumstances.
Once you identify your crucial moments, do what Yan did: Identify moderately challenging
situations where you can practice the target skill. For Yan, simply framing these occasions as
practice lowered the stakes and increased her motivation to attempt them. Following each
attempt, she did a mental debrief, rating her eectiveness and stress level. Over time, she found the
rst rating went up and the second went down, which gave her a greater sense of competence and
condence for the next round. She was careful not to jump into the deep end of the pool at her rst
attempt. She began by challenging business owners who were late in turningin their expenses. Later
she addressed concerns about their spendthrift tendencies something she felt even more anxiety
about.
An important element of deliberate practice is the focus on a discrete skill. Yan studied up on skills
for crucial conversations and decidedto focus on one: creating safety. She opened a conversation by
making an overt reference to the common purpose she hoped she shared with the person she was
confronting. In her rst attempt, she found this gave her a sense of condence by suggesting a script
with which to begin. But her condence grew even more when she saw how it put the other person
at ease and reduced defensiveness.
Yan found that her emotions calmed if she took a moment to clarify her motives prior to opening a
crucial conversation with a more powerful person. Before scheduling the conversation, she paused,
took a deep breath, and asked, What do I really want? Historically, her desire was to avoid conict
with powerful people, but this conicted with her deeper values. As she pondered what she really
wanted, she connected with her desire to be a person of integrity and strength. This awareness
helped her subordinate her fears to something more important and quieted them signicantly. It
gave her a feeling of focus and determination.
One of my most cherished memories of Yan isthe day she let me know that I had wronged her. She
told me with great conviction that I had been unfair in the stock award she had been given, relative
to others in the rm. She tactfully expressed her disappointment and laid out her case for a dierent
calculation. I ultimately agreed with her argument. But more important, I was struck that the person
who admonished me that way was markedly dierent from the one who trembled out a suggestion
to Al just a few years earlier.
You can changeyour own career-limiting habitif you identify your own crucial moments, seek out
brief and intentional opportunities for deliberate practice, and build skills in addressing emotional
barriers to your progress. Dont let fear or inertiahold you back.
Joseph Grenny is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and
leading social scientist for business performance. His work has been translated into 28 languages, is
available in 36 countries, and has generated results for 300 of the Fortune 500. He is the cofounder of
VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development.
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