I ask the question with all the right intentions. Could you actually be one of those difficult people that you hate so much? I don’t think any of us realize that we can at times be difficult.

Me, I’ve been guilty of yelling, being a frequent critic and being slightly bullying at times. I hope I don’t do this often enough to be known as one of those difficult people but then you never know.

Take stock of your behaviour and try to figure out whether there are times that you can be difficult and you might be surprised at the answer.

The thing is that if you want to get things done, I believe that there are actually times that you need to be difficult. There are times that you’ll need to resort to quasi obnoxious behaviours to get your way. Sometimes a single minded dedication to something requires a bit of difficult behaviour.

But just a bit. So go out today and get something done by being difficult. Just don’t do it again tomorrow.

Reading about Rob Ford on the weekend brought to mind all of the difficult people I have had to deal with in my career. Not as many as some I would imagine as I’ve spent most of my life out of the business mainstream but enough to know that it isn’t pretty.

Difficult personalities come in all stripes and flavours (perhaps in Ford’s case it is all shapes and sizes.)

• The boss or customer who moves the goal posts.
• The yeller or loud talker.
• The ones whose erratic behaviour makes it difficult to predict what’s next.
• The bully.
• The stonewaller.
• The perpetual critic.

The thing that is common to all of them is control. They seek to control a situation, to control you, and in this way get what they want because you’ll be to scared or terrified not to meet their needs.

Difficult people are that way because it works for them. They find what they get what they want by being difficult. For some reason, it’s a strategy that works, even over the long term.

What continually amazes me is how people put up with difficult people for so long. Why are we so slow to invalidate them, to get them out of the way? Why do we let ourselves be led by the Rob Fords of the world?

I feel like I’m opening up another can of worms in this subject of being open to feedback. For some reason, I am continually finding things that are normally seen as simple in the blogosphere are really quite problematic.

Case in point: Today I was having a tea with Joe Wilson, a colleague from MaRS days. He was talking about the feedback entrepreneurs get about their business and when should they listen to the feedback and when shouldn’t they? It’s one thing to be open to feedback but as I questioned yesterday, who should you listen to and then today I’ll ask the question: What Feedback Counts?

So you have someone whose opinion you respect but should you listen to the feedback? What is good feedback and what is bad feedback? What should you take in and what should you ignore?

Many years ago when we were starting Synamics we got a piece of advice from Bob Ferchat, the CEO of Nortel that we should learn to swim in our own bay before going out in the big lake. What he meant was learn to make it in Canada before going to export markets. Worse piece of advice I ever got as it impeded our growth for years. We were open to feedback and we were listening to the right person but should his feedback have counted? In retrospect I would have to say no.

Unfortunately I don’t have an answer for what feedback counts and I’m not sure I ever will. All I’ve learned in the past few years is that it’s not all about the logic. You need to listen to your gut as well as your mind. If they both say listen then do. If either says don’t listen then don’t.

I was watching the finale of Survivor last night (I had totally forgotten it on Sunday) and saw some particularly interesting exchanges between contestants. Numerous failed contestants were critiquing the performance of successful ones and it made me wonder. Being open for feedback is one thing but who do you listen to? (Or correctly stated, to whom do you listen?)

• If you’re a working stiff, do you ned to always listen to your boss?
• Should you always listen to customers?
• How about direct reports, co-workers etc?
• Your family, friends or even your mom?

In starting a business, I am struggling with this right now. I pride myself on being open to feedback but I’m getting too many different messages to be able to figure out who I should be listening to.

I figure the key thing is that as long as you’re open to feedback, it will all work itself out. The minute you’re not open to feedback from someone or some group then you run the risk of missing some nugget of truth.

It all comes down to something I’ve said before. You have to wake up each morning thinking that everything you know could be wrong. If you don’t think this then you might miss some very important piece of feedback.

You have to be open for feedback but that doesn’t mean you have to take it.

There’s a lot of bloviating going on out there on the net on the topic of being open to feedback. I was talking to someone the other day about what I was doing here and they asked if I wanted feedback and that got me thinking. Am I open enough to it?

So I went on the net to find out more on the subject and as a result, think that we may be thinking of being open to feedback in the wrong way. Most sites out there give all sorts of info on why being open to feedback is important and how to do it. BORING.

I think it all comes down to vulnerability. If we aren’t vulnerable, we won’t be open to feedback. You need to be vulnerable to put yourself out there, to create something, to stand up and speak for what you believe in, to welcome change.

As Brene Brown says, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. The problem is that if you can’t be vulnerable then you won’t be open to feedback or criticism.

And if you can be vulnerable then you’ll be looking for feedback. This is what good innovators, creative types and change artists have to be. They might not be open to verbal feedback but the ultimate criticism is to have your work, your ideas, your efforts rejected.

The big corollary to all this is that if you aren’t open to feedback then you aren’t being vulnerable. This means you aren’t putting your best foot forward. You aren’t giving it your all, stretching yourself to create.

If you can’t be open to feedback, if you can’t be vulnerable, why bother even showing up?

In order to learn leadership, there are three things we need. We need a coach to show us how to improve, a process to follow, and some data to know if we are making progress. The trouble is that in the process of learning to be leaders we rarely get all of these.

Think about learning to play hockey.

• You get a coach (have you ever heard of a hockey team without a coach).
• You get process (where to position yourself, how to move, what to do in each situation.)
• And you get some data (minutes played,plus/minus, shots,penalties, goals.)

Now think about business and the process of leadership and we’re lucky to get any of these.

• Two thirds of bosses are lousy so you won’t get much coaching there.
• You get very little in terms of personal processes such as how to communicate, motivate, delegate, set a vision etc.
• And you don’t get metrics to be able to judge how you’re doing as a leader.

Fundamentally we need to reinvent how we learn leadership to ensure that we get good coaching, useful process and relevant metrics.

Bill Gates said it perfectly with regard to teachers in this recent TED Talk.

Every now and then, conversations with multiple people and different times come together. I was sitting in a meeting yesterday when someone said: “When all you are selling is a commodity, data is the new competitive differentiator.”

We were discussing how to make a business case for some changes to their ERP system. That piled on a conversation I had recently with Mario Laudi about his new firm HireFully and his attempt to help people make better hiring decisions. This added to another conversation with Carmen Jeffrey at i-identify about how hirers normally do reference checks. And then there was Tuesday’s post on People Analytics.

And it hit me. Where’s our data?

If we set out to buy a new machine for the use in production, we make a business case, establish our need for feeds and speeds, rate suppliers against those metrics and when we have actually implemented whatever it is we bought, we then use metrics to evaluate production.

But what about people?

What metrics are we using to determine that we really need someone? What metrics do we use to evaluate potential hires? How do we apply metrics to reference checks? How do we evaluate them when they’re working?

In a world of Six Sigma and Five Nines Reliability, where data is the new competitive tool, what metrics are we using to hire and manage people? Where’s our data?

Ed Veckie of Unified Engineering forwarded a great article about People Analytics. It seems that Google has done it again and has taken a radically different approach to managing people that it has described under the term People Analytics. A blog by John Sullivan at Ere.net describes the approach.

Since people in the knowledge economy are the biggest expense, people management decisions are the most important ones that you can make. Hence the need for people analytics. Other areas of the business use analytics so why not HR? Well HR typically runs on trust and relationships but that isn’t enough anymore.

Two key quotes highlight their goals: “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics”  The goal is to … “bring the same level of rigor to people-decisions that we do to engineering decisions”

Within Google there is a group called PiLab that “conducts applied experiments within Google to determine the most effective approaches for managing people and maintaining a productive environment (including the type of reward that makes employees the happiest).”

This trend to evidence based management won’t stop. Concepts like People Analytics and Return on People are bound to invade even the world of HR in time.

Are you a Buttinski? I hope so, as everyone needs a Buttinski in his or her life. At this point, you may be wondering what exactly is a Buttinski. Well here goes.

Whether you have employees working for you, friends who call on you for help from time to time, kids who need attention or just someone who is handy for advice, chances are you are a Buttinski. In fact you would probably have to live in a cave to not be a Buttinski.

The thing is, no matter what you do, you are called upon on a frequent basis for help, advice, counselling, problem solving etc. Now when you do this ‘stuff’, what do you call yourself?

Some people call themselves consultants, others mentors, coaches, trainers etc. Unfortunately, all of these words have negative connotations when they are done for a living. So I’ve been looking for a better word to describe this valuable service.

I checked with an online Thesaurus and a few alternates came up. I thought being a Second-Guesser was an apt description, as was Kibitzer and Backseat Driver. You could go with the Latin definition and call yourself an Interjectus Knowitallum. But the one that struck the best chord was Buttinski.

So go forth and opine knowing that you too have joined the ranks of the professional Buttinski. Now if only we could come up with a new term for Leadership.

If you think having a teacher’s pet or the boss’s useless son is bad for the office, wait till you see what happens when there is love in the office. I’m not about to get up on some moralistic high horse here but I think I can prove what others really think about office relationships.

I used to be totally nonchalant about these things, after all, once you’re out of school, where else are you going to find love? In fact at Synamics, in one situation, I went on to foster and encourage an office relationship.

Sometimes I do get wiser though and have come to realize that love in the office isn’t any good for the office.

Proof in point: Survivor. Yes I do love being able to study management and strategy with Survivor. I have now seen every single episode of every year and think it is one of the best shows ever created because you can watch interpersonal dynamics and strategy in the raw.

Whenever two people in Survivor look like they’re about to become a couple, one of them gets voted out. In fact, the surest way to get voted out is to look like you’ve got an unbreakable bond with one particular person.

It’s not just because contestants are threatened by a voting block, it’s because of fairness. Intrinsically, each person wants to think they’re being treated in an equal and fair manner by each other person. (Or in the case of Survivor, an equally unfair manner.)

The existence of another couple in a relationship means that outsiders are cut out of an equal chance for being treated in an unbiased manner.The people in the relationship will naturally favour each other to the detriment of those outside the relationship.

And so it is in the office. Even where couples aren’t in the same department, if they have to work together, others will feel that they are being treated in a less than equal fashion.

But in the end, if love is in the air, go for it. Life isn’t perfect and neither is work. Who cares about the office anyway? Your career won’t comfort you when you’re old and grey.

If you’re watching just such a relationship, get over it. Shit happens.