How conscious are you?

Cicero is well and truly back.

And for those of you agitating and worrying about the lack of presence from Him, sorry. The time off stretched on a wee bit longer than planned. Hopefully you were able to cope.

As you know the VTSSB and its Apparatchiks have by now been left far to stern although Cicero still retains a special affection for the people left behind there and wishes them all well as they deal with the Two Caesars. Good luck.

Anyway it is good to be back and for the past few weeks Cicero has been collecting many new experiences and developing many new ideas and thoughts to share with you.

So let’s get started.......we have no time to waste......we have a lot of catching up to do.

We are going to start with a little exercise.

We will start by signing our names. Go on, do it. Yes, you. Do it now.
Good. Now how long did that take? Not long. No doubt you did it in less than the blink of an eyelid. Nor was it especially painful. You will have expended less than one hand’s worth of brain cells doing it. Correct? In essence you signed your name without even thinking about it. Aren’t you clever?

Now swap hands and repeat the exercise.

How difficult was that? It is surmised that, unless you are ambidextrous, that took a lot longer, was far more painful and you had to think long and hard before making any move with your pen on the paper. Correct? And no doubt too your new autograph is far less legible than the one you scrawled with your natural hand.

And therein lies today’s lesson. For you have just demonstrated the difference between being consciously incompetent and unconsciously competent and such understanding is of vital importance and a critical concern to any leader in any business.

Most of us for most of the time are unconsciously competent. We know what we are doing. We do it well and without fuss and without thinking about it. Just like signing our name with our writing hand. And in this state we are no problem, not an issue.

But sometimes some of us can be unconsciously incompetent. We don’t know we are doing a bad job, unaware that we could be doing things better or differently. This is worse than writing our autographs with our non writing hand.

As leaders we cannot ignore this state. It is our job to point this out to our people and to root out unconscious incompetence. Incompetence at this level if unchecked drags down the performance of the team and saps the morale and motivation of our star performers. It must be checked to stop the spread of incompetence through the team.

In taking action we move our unconscious incompetent to being consciously incompetent. We now know that we could be doing better, that we are under-performing compared to peers and to the standard of the job. In this state the leader can take action and move to the next level when our incompetent is transformed into being consciously competent. The work is taking a time to be completed but the quality is good and improving though much effort and concentration is being applied to make sure the job is being done right.

And then we reach nirvana, a heavenly state of peace and tranquillity. We have arrived at unconsciously competent. We can do the job to a high standard without thinking about it. We don’t think about how we sign our name, how to breathe, how to drive our cars, we just do it. We have arrived at our destination.

In this journey it is our role as leaders to move our people from unconsciously incompetent to unconsciously competent as quickly and as painlessly as possible. There have been many times in past few weeks when Yours Truly has felt hopelessly incompetent (yes that is difficult to believe) but with the help and support of some great leaders, you would be amazed in how many new areas Cicero is now unconsciously competent.

So just how conscious are you? Let us know.

Is it only me......but paper cuts can be good.

As you may know Cicero treats his body as a temple and he works hard to keep it young looking and in good shape through regular exercise at a local gymnasium. A few days back Cicero headed off there to refresh, renew and re-invigorate his ageing, though well toned, body, only to be told that he had to renew his membership and hand over some sesterces before he might exercise to ensure sano in corpore et sano in mente. Not a problem.

What was a problem however was the insistence that before he might renew his membership he had to re-complete an application form and hand over exactly the same details that had been supplied previously. Cicero was not chuffed and made his feelings known. Given that Cicero’s details were already held on the system, Cicero wanted to know why these had to be re-provided.

‘I appreciate what you are saying but nothing to do with me. Its Head Office’, was the reply. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. The kind of response that Cicero just hates. Do some organisations require staff to have frontal lobotomies on joining to render thinking and the application of common sense redundant?

Now it might only be me but it is time that in businesses across the land, in TSSBs and VTSSBs, we made a stand to get paper out of the system. Paper clogs up our processes and adds cost where cost is unnecessary. What happens to all the bits of paper which are only backing up information held on computers? Do we employ someone just to file them away just in case?

And have we considered the environmental impact of all this paper we needlessly produce? As you know Cicero is big on the environment and is concerned about the de-forestation effects of pointless paper.

So from now on Cicero has a new mission in life-to rid state and private sector bureaucracies of pointless paper. Will you join him?

It is great to be back.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.