Susan J. Ashford - The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth

To all the people who stay in the game, finding the courage and the competencies to keep growing throughout their lives

What would you do if you discoveredafter spending twenty years helping to lead a successful and widely respected businessthat you needed to learn how to lead all over again.

Thats what happened to Maggie Bayless. And to make matters worse, Maggie found herself facing not one but three equally daunting challenges, in her work and personal life, all at once.

Baylesss first challenge grew out of a major change at her workplace. Bayless had been a cofounder and a comanaging partner of a well-known business-to-business training firm. She loved the work and the company was successful, steadily adding clients, growing its staff, and expanding its revenues and its profitability. But the funny thing was that Bayless, though one of the chief officers of the company, had somehow avoided having too many direct reports. Every time we hired someone new, she recalls with a chuckle, Id say to my partner, Stas, Thats fineas long as they report to you.

It worked great... until the day when Stas announced his retirement. I was so happy for Stas, Bayless says. And then I realized, Uh-oh, that means everyone here is going to report to me now. Suddenly the business veterana gifted adviser who had helped many in the company cope with their own difficult leadership challengeswould have to start managing the whole team herself: guiding them in making tough decisions, helping them cope with thorny client issues, resolving conflicts among members of her team, making fair decisions about how to allocate resources, and balancing conflicting strategic demands.

For the first time in years, Bayless found herself wondering whether she had what it took to be successful on the job. Were her leadership abilities and her interpersonal skills up to par?

It didnt help that two personal challenges had simultaneously popped up in Baylesss life. One was expected, but it still involved the stresses that often accompany change: her youngest daughter left for college, leaving Bayless and her husband with an empty nest for the first time in more than twenty-five years. The other was unexpected and deeply traumatic: a serious health scare that required emergency surgery, two additional operations, and the risk of long-term complications that could hamper Baylesss ability to work at all.

For Bayless, this triple-threat year would test her in unprecedented ways. Could she develop the new range of skillsin leadership and in personal effectivenessthat she would need to master the business, family, and physical difficulties she suddenly faced? Could she make these difficult and emotional experiences work for her and her personal growth?

The answers to these questions would have a huge impact on Bayless herself. But they would also affect her family, her colleagues, her clients, and the long-term success of the company she had cofounded and the people who were counting on her to shepherd it into the future.

While Maggie Baylesss circumstances were uniquely her own, we all face unexpected, unfamiliar experiences that call for new talents, new insights, and new abilities. In fact, almost everyone can expect to be in Baylesss shoes, suddenly needing to change and grow, at some point in their life. Especially in todays unpredictable world, we all have times when we face unexpected change and the anxiety it can create; we all know what it is like to have many difficult things on our plate all at once. By practicing the Power of Flexing, you not only learn more about yourself but develop a resilience muscle that will help you get through these tough times.

This book is about how people like Maggie Baylessand like you and mecan develop the soft, interpersonal skills we need to manage and control our emotions, communicate well, lead effectively, adapt to changing conditions, and solve complex problems. And while we refer to these skills as soft, theyre vitally important. In fact, 92 percent of respondents in Deloittes Global Human Capital Trends report rate these skills as critical to employee retention, better leadership, and a more meaningful culture. Such skills are needed to overcome the challenges we face in business and to be a better leader within a company or, for that matter, within any kind of groupa nonprofit, a church, a community organization, a family. It explains a system anyone can use to continually grow and develop by getting better at gathering insights and learning from the raw material we all have access tothe experiences we encounter simply by being alive. That system is the Power of Flexing.

Flexing is a particular method for increasing your own effectiveness and, for those in organizations, your effectiveness in influencing and leading others. It was developed based on my work with students, emerging leaders, and senior leaders over the years. It draws on a range of research that suggests ways in which individuals can manage their own personal development, and is based on more than seventy-five interviews that my students and I have conducted with leaders and others we admire. All these inputs are woven into this book. Flexing is an approach to growing your effectiveness that is unique and has several notable attributes.

First, its proactive: it puts you in the drivers seat in guiding your own growth. You decide when, how, and why you want to grow, and develop your own plan for learning and self-development. You never need to wait for someone else to provide you with the tools, activities, or opportunities needed to grow.

Second, as the name implies, its flexible: it lets you pursue personal growth in ways that suit your needs and resources. You can flex at work, in your relationship with your boss, in a short-term project in the community, or as a parent, spouse, or church member. You can use flexing to enhance your personal effectiveness, then maybe drop it for a while and pick it up again when you feel moved to do so.

Third, its manageable: it provides you with methods for learning and growing that can fit comfortably into most peoples daily schedules. Developing important new skills is often treated as a major undertaking and a substantial commitment: you go to grad school, you sign up for therapy, you hope to be designated as high potential by your company and sent off for a challenging overseas assignment. But why wait for opportunities like these? Flexing lets you get started on building your personal skills now, using the everyday experiences youre having anyway. To borrow a term from the world of agile software development, its a sprintor a series of sprintsrather than a marathon.

Fourth, its playful and fun. Personal development doesnt need to be a grim or painful endeavor. Flexing is about experimentation: trying new ways of doing things, seeing what happens, thinking differently (and more positively) about failure and mistakes, and then trying something else. Most likely, no single experiment will be life altering (although you never know!). But, cumulatively, the experiments you try may provide you with fresh ideas, approaches, and skills that will help you achieve surprising new successes in your daily life and workall while having fun exploring sides of yourself you may not have known existed.

For all these reasons, many of those whove tried the Power of Flexingfrom the day MBA students using it to frame their consulting work, to the hundreds of executive MBA students who have learned it as a lifelong strategy for owning their leadership development, to those who have engaged these ideas in their company settingshave found it to be a surprisingly helpful, enjoyable, and powerful method for building their personal effectiveness and their leadership skills simply by approaching and thinking about the activities of their daily lives in a creative new way.