What You Can Learn From Vanilla Ice
October 30, 2019
Chris Raffle
Looking at the year ahead, I'd like us to define some goals around how you can be more like Vanilla Ice.
Those are words that may make you second guess your manager's ability to lead. At the very least, you are hoping they are not advocating for you to start looting foreclosed homes or to acquire a pet wallaroo and goat.
You will have no trouble finding a lot of people who think Vanilla Ice offers very little influence to improve company culture. A high percentage of those people also have not dissected the career-defining, lyrical masterpiece "Ice Ice Baby"; their opinion would rapidly shift if they had. Vanilla Ice laced inspiring epithets throughout his song, and I wanted to use this post as an opportunity to highlight the two best lines you should adopt to your work:
All right stop, collaborate, and listen
Vanilla Ice knew how to tap into the impressionable minds of 1990, and he foresaw the skills they would need to cultivate to be successful leaders and coworkers. This lyric succinctly captured three of those skills and also showed he missed a calling as a corporate motivational speaker.
- Stop - Stop whatever you are doing and focus on the problem at hand. Being successful at multitasking means you manage multiple projects in-flight, not that you explicitly try to do multiple tasks simultaneously requiring critical thought. Real-time multitasking ensures you can only dedicate a fraction of your attention to each task and will result in accidents such as missing a critical project detail or the context behind a question that someone asks you in the course of the meeting.
- Collaborate - Once you are focused on the issue, collaboration is critical as it is very rare one person will ever have all the answers. Even if you think you have all the answers, collaborating with others will help ensure a better outcome as critical stakeholders will have an opportunity to engage and buy into the ultimate solution.
- Listen - Listening does not mean you have to remain silent and let others speak; it means you have to practice empathy, respond professionally, and embrace constructive criticism. Make sure you understand the difference between participating in, driving, and dominating the discussion. When you participate in emotionally charged conversations, practice active listening; acknowledge queues indicating frustration or uncertainty that will fracture relationships and progress. Driving a discussion means you are actively seeking engagement with other participants while ensuring the discussion progresses to actionable outcomes. Asking the right question to segue between two points will drive a discussion more effectively than telling your audience what the next item on the agenda is. Dominating a discussion means the only thing you are seeking is a glass of water and nodding heads.
If there was a problem, yo I'll solve it
Rob Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice's non-stage name) espoused the virtues of owning the problems with which one is presented. Whether the audience is your customers, coworkers, or senior leadership, they desire and appreciate individuals who will own critical challenges. Be careful not to mistake ownership for single-handedly solving the issue. Successful ownership means being: responsive, empathetic, committed to timelines, admitting and mitigating mistakes, and ultimately delivering a satisfactory resolution. It would be fair to say that RVW never took ownership of the transgressions he committed on pop culture, but that should not deter you from applying this mantra in your day-to-day interactions.
If you are an individual on a team, look for ways you can reflect these credos and lead by example. If you are a leader, look for ways you can instill these beliefs within your team and offer recognition when they excel.
In my last corporate role, we recognized top performers in the department on a quarterly basis, and while I have an intrinsic passion for data-based decisions, there are some efforts that simply cannot be captured numerically. I developed the 'Cool as Ice' award to recognize when individuals epitomized the best of Vanilla Ice. If you don't think Vanilla Ice is the right figurehead to highlight these feats, I assure you that there are a wealth of other misguided 90s musicians from which to choose.
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