This book has an awful title, but says a lot of great things

I recently finished a new book called The Power of Flexing by University of Michigan Business School professor Susan Ashford. (For the record, this is my favorite business school in the country, filled with great professors dedicated to a humane view of organizations.) 

I will confess I was turned off by the "flexing" title of the book. The book is about something straightforward, increasing your effectiveness in interpersonal situations. The word "flexing" is itself strange – to me, flexing is something you do with muscles. And the book at the beginning defines flexing in an unhelpful way, talking about setting "flex" goals, conducting experiments to see what techniques work, and reflecting on what you've learned. Bleck.

But despite the bad title and the introductory verbiage, this is a great book, filled with insights about human behavior and, more importantly, practical and actionable suggestions about how to improve yourself. Here are a few, divided into insights about behavior and practical steps you can take to improve. (Again, you will note that some have nothing to do with "flexing" but rather with growing and improving as a person.)

• "Building your personal effectiveness and your leadership skills involves risk. It demands that we consciously choose to move out of our comfort zones. But it has to happen if we want to grow. Growth and comfort will never co-exist. Whatever makes you uncomfortable is your biggest opportunity for growth."

• "Perfectionism is one of the most-common barriers to learning and growth." So is what the book calls the "genius culture." Employees in a genius culture approach experience not with a learning mindset but rather as if girded for battle, intensely pursuing their productivity goals but ignoring their need to grow and develop as individuals, and regarding activities like pausing for reflection as a mere waste of time."

• "It's not that there is a 'right' experience or set of experiences. It is that a successful leader have made the most out of the experiences they've had. Whatever they are doing at the time, they wring meaning from it. They learn. They approach experiences with a 'learning mindset.'"

• The process of learning starts by becoming more mindful – by paying attention, on purpose and actively, in the present moment."

• A key suggestion in the book is that people set what the book calls "flex goals." Crucially, these are not goals about performance. They are goals that "arise out of something you want to work on about yourself, some area where you want to grow. They are about learning, not achievement – about you and the growth you want in your own personal effectiveness." (The book never discusses why these should be called "flex" goals.) Discussing flex goals in training sessions with managers, the author discovered the most-common kinds of flex goals involved enhancing presentation skills, managing relationships, and getting better at delegating/empowering subordinates. The book suggests setting one or at most two flex goals at a time.

• The book recommends that people write down their flex goals and share them with colleagues. (The book cites a research study where people who publicly agreed to reduce their energy consumption reduced it more than those who didn't.)

• The book recommends that people "identify an upcoming experience that presents you with a challenge. Adopt a learning mindset with respect to the experience. How can you go through it as a learner, recognizing that, in addition to performing well, you want to be open to learning all that this experience may have to teach you."

• To help you do better at learning and growing, the book recommends an exercise it calls "reflective best self." You "solicit stories from others describing you at your best. By revealing your important current strengths, the exercise helps you identify resources you can build on as you start a path for future growth." Another version of that is to reflect on three things:  asking people to "name three things you are proud of that make you good at your job." One study found that people who did that "experienced greater energy, enjoyed an enhanced impact on others, and had more clout at work." The same applies to "savoring" positive experiences – talking about them with others and reminiscing about them.

• A key recommendation in the book is to carry out specific experiments testing behaviors you think may increase your leadership and personal effectiveness. "You can set yourself on a path to growth simply by trying out different behaviors and assessing their impact. Say your flex goal is to be more influential at meetings. You can test the idea that it will help if you speak less by holding back and speaking less in your team meetings, then keeping track of the decisions made in the meeting, comparing your rate of success in shaping those decisions with the same from past meetings." Another example is promoting the goal of seeming more approachable by testing the impact of smiling more at meetings. They recommend starting experiments small, and, if it works, scaling them up.

• To elicit better feedback from others on your behavior, use an open-ended question, "What could I have said differently?" rather than a yes-or-no question.

As I thought through these various practical suggestions, I said to myself that I should really be applying them in my daily life. Unfortunately, at this point in my career, I only have a little over a year left until I retire, so not really enough time to make this part of an ongoing routine. Blog readers who are younger have more time available, and you should start now.