“He is a bright guy, but seems like he is in his comfort zone.”
“She is great, but as soon as you ask her to step out and talk to the customer, she loses her shine.”
Reader, haven’t all of us either overheard or participated in similar conversations? In fact, for many of us, it is a part of work. As in, we have to know what makes people tick. And if it is a bad fit, we have to give up on people.
One of the keys to facilitating team members is understanding what makes them tick and exposing them to those things.
Sloooowly.
Not by shocking them! (On a side note, this is how the ice bucket challenge started.)
And still, we regularly put our team members in such untenable situations, because we think that we are helping them “get out of their comfort zone”.
The problem is that our understanding of our comfort zone is incomplete.
Either you’re OUT or you’re IN
We are led to believe that there are only two zones: outside comfort zone and inside comfort zone
And makes us push people. Burn them mentally. Or sometimes, give them a false sense of accomplishment.
There are at least 4 zones
Comfort, Groan, Growth, and Panic These are self-explanatory zones and you can stop reading beyond this. But if you’re still reading this, thank you.
Comfort zone: our old self lives in this zone and we maintain our old patterns
Groan zone: there’s a little familiarity, a little bit of anxiety, feels risky and we want to fall back to the comfort zone
Growth zone: feeling confident, experiencing the integration of past knowledge with fresh knowledge, sense of fulfillment, peak performance
Panic zone: fight, flight or freeze, learning stops
So what?
Okay, so what’s the big deal? Now we can talk in terms of 4 zones. But it is not that simple.
We have to train ourselves to understand what makes people tick and what their incremental learning phases are. Also, we have the additional burden of keeping our seductive urge to manage people in check.
We have a choice to make
A choice to look at people around us in a binary of 0 and 1.
OR
A choice to look at people more humanely.
So, as soon as we embrace the 4 zones, we can’t say: – “I’m pushing her out of her comfort zone” – “He’s just not ready to go out of his comfort zone”
Because what do we mean by “out of comfort zone”? Groan? Growth? or Panic?
See? There’s a nuance to people’s comfort zones.
For example, you have a team member named Suresh. You noticed that when you ask Suresh to visit customers in their office and talk to them, he cannot make the sale. His performance becomes average.
But on the telephone, he can sell anything to anyone.
By pushing Suresh for in-person meetings, you may mistake thinking that you’re helping him. But you might be directly pushing him into the “panic” zone.
It would be more beneficial to scaffold Suresh’s journey by: – Introducing the customer over a call – Sending Suresh with other sales staff to acclimatize on sales calls – Inviting the customer to meet Suresh at the office
There are such 100s of possible ways to gently and incrementally push Suresh. In a way that is helpful to him.
So, that’s how changing the way we look at things, indeed changes things. In this case, people.
How did you find today’s letter? Hit Reply and share it with me. Feel free to share any of your pet theories, too.
Reads of the week:
Almost 2000 years back in Italy, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed and permanently preserved the city of Pompeii.
It also preserved a library with thousands of scrolls in it. But we couldn’t open or read them. They’re charred and fried by the lava. But no more.
Thanks to GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, his Vesuvius Challenge has begun revealing the contents of the scrolls using AI and 3D modeling.