What is
elephant thinking and how we can use it to recognize our strength?
Some weeks
ago I read a book ”Self-leadership and the one minute manager” written by Ken
Blanchard, Susan Fowler, and Laurence Hawkins. The book provides a nice story
of one person increasing his effectiveness three cornerstones of situational
self-leadership. The first one is “challenge assumed constraints”, the second
one is “celebrate your points of power”, and the last one is “collaborate for
success”.
But first
to elephant thinking. Elephant thinking comes from the story of training
elephants. Very beginning of training young elephants are locked with chains to
poles and by the time they get used that and are not trying to escape. Later on
chain does not need to be strong or either the pole does not need to be deeply
grounded since elephant assumed it cannot escape due the chain and pole even it
has enough power to cut the chain or pull the pole out of the ground. Elephant
is the prisoner of its own learned assumptions.
Based on
this, the first cornerstone of self-leadership encourages us to challenge our
assumptions, our ways of thinking basing on past experiences and to break the
chains and to pull the poles out of the ground. It also reminds us that no one
is mind reader, but still we assume what other people are thinking and we make
assumptions based on those.
Next pole
on the road of the self-leadership is “celebrate your points of power”. This is
something what we need when recognizing our strengths. Quite often people are
feeling powerless when they feel not to have right position. When asked what
kind of power exists, they will answer only position power. But that is not
true, there are different kinds of powers to use to affect to people around.
Recognizing these powers and knowing nature of those reveals the strengths of
the person opening the ways to lead yourself. What are those powers then?
- Position power – Power provided by authority.
- Relationship power – Power to be well networked and using connections to get help from the correct people to make work done.
- Knowledge power – Power of knowing the system, knowing the processes and practices.
- Task power – Similar power with knowledge power, but power is more on real doing not just knowing.
- Personal power – Power to give assurance to people and make them feel comfortable with whatever they are doing.
Next time
when you feel for example that you are not in a position to get people to do
what you want them to do, just take a few seconds and think about is the
position power only solution in your case.
The third
stone of self-leadership is “collaborate for success”. This requires that you
know your needs. What kind of support you need, is it supporting, directing,
delegating or coaching type of. And in order to get what you need is to use
words “I need” to tell about your needs. There is real magic in those words
because human beings love to be needed and feel they can help you and share the
success with you.
The book
full of absolutely great and thoughtful tips and tricks for increasing your
effectiveness and ability to recognize personal strengths and competences. I
found a lot of new ideas to my everyday life from this book.
