If you’re a reader of business books, you’re probably familiar with “Good to Great,” a huge-seller from author Jim Collins, based on research about companies that took a sharp turn toward the profitable and stayed there – performing at least three times as well as the market for at least 15 years.
One of the interesting insights Collins’ research team found about good-to-great companies was that the corporate leaders – the CEOs who led the initial charge and then kept it going – were all relatively modest people. The words “quiet,” “humble” and “self-effacing” kept coming up in interviews with people who knew the CEOs. Not one was a hot-shot egotist; not one was big on talking about himself or herself.
In fact, one of the methods researchers use to measure people’s egos is to consider how often they talk about themselves, by counting the times they use first-person singular pronouns – such as “I,” “me” and “my” – in their speaking and writing. Collins makes reference to this in “Good to Great,” chiding that at least one non-great leader used the word “I” almost three times as often as “we.” And in a recently publicized paper titled “It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance,” Penn State researchers Don Hambrick and Arjit Chatterjee note that they studied transcripts of interviews with CEOs to see how often first-person pronouns cropped up.
Of course, talking about you isn’t an altogether rotten thing. Personal stories can be enlightening, and a willingness to tell them can show audiences that you’re not afraid to share something of your inner self. But when speakers and writers do a whole bunch of I-talking and I-writing, it truly can start to signal “I’m all about me,” and it can turn people off.
If you want to be known as someone with an enormous opinion of yourself, one of the easiest ways to live up to that reputation is to talk about you, you, you. But if you want to avoid looking like a narcissist – or if, what the heck, you truly want to bring others into the discussion – the logical way to do that is to reduce your use of “I,” “me” and “my.”
One way is simply to turn things around. When you find yourself leading into an anecdote that doesn’t need to be focused on you (“I was reading an article…”), focus instead on where the real information is (“A piece in ‘Fast Company’ says…”). Turn chronicles about personal thoughts (“I realized…”) into ideas that others have also considered (“We’ve all thought about…”). And most importantly, when you’re taking credit for something (“I’ve directed my team …”), focus on the broader contribution of others (“The entire department is working toward …”).
Overall, it’s not imperative that you splice yourself out of everything you say, speaking only of others in a selfless attempt to portray modesty that you may or may not feel. But it is important to show the world now and then that you understand something every intelligent adult should know: Baby, it’s not all about you.
This classic Miss Communications column was originally published August 10, 2007.
Comments