Duke Ellington once said, “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.” I just love this perspective. I wonder how many of us really see it this way? I wonder how many of us as leaders, when people on our teams bring us situations that feel like a problem, see it as an opportunity to do our best?
Reflect with me for a moment. Stop, take a sip of your coffee, and think back over your last week. What is a situation or a problem that someone on your team brought you? Do you feel as a leader that your perspective was a chance for you to do your best? Do you feel you took the opportunity to help the person bringing you the problem to do their best?
Perspective
One of the more interesting things about being an executive coach is that I get an opportunity to have a lot of interactions with a lot of different leaders. I have been known to log over 42 hours of Zoom meetings sometimes in a couple of weeks! For me, and I am sure you as well, this has been a pretty typical pace since the pandemic started.
For the past couple of years, I have been paying closer attention to not only what people are showing up with, but how they show up. In leadership coaching, I get the chance to help folks look at their leadership and ensure how they show up is how they intend to keep showing up.
Most of us want to make sure our intentions match our impact. It is my experience, however, that not many of us stop and think proactively about what we want our impact to be. Especially when there is a problem and that problem has an emotion attached to it.
Go back to the reflection you did at the beginning of this post. As a leader, when the person on your team brought you the problem, did how you want to show up match how you did show up? Or, were you so caught up in the emotion of the problem that you had a hard time even knowing what problem it was you were trying to solve? I see this a lot! I will often ask folks I am working with...”Now, what problem is it we are solving exactly? Let's keep the main thing.”
Example
Some of you know that I am an avid golfer. Not a good golfer, but I really enjoy the challenge the game brings to me. So many little things have to be done right to hit a good golf shot, and once in a while, I hit a good one even though I don’t do everything right. Those are the ones that keep me coming back.
So for Valentine’s Day one year, my wife gave me a great gift. It was a golf fitting for new clubs. It was a really great experience for me and I was like a kid in a candy store. I was so excited! This was something I had always wanted to do.
When the day came for me to go to the fitting, I walked in at 3:30 pm for my appointment and I was met by this really high-energy guy named James. He could tell I had one eye on the bay where you get to try out the new clubs. But before he would let me take a swing, he asked me a question, “Why are you here?” My response was not well thought out, nor very accurate it turns out.
I told James “I have always wanted to do this and I am really excited,” I quipped, just wanting to get into that bay and hit a ball with the newest technology golf club makers have to offer.
“Awesome!” James responded, with so much enthusiasm that it was effervescent coming out of him.
But, then he changed his tone, took his enthusiasm down about 3 notches, and said, “I appreciate your excitement, but why are you here? What is it that you are trying to achieve through this experience in your golf game?”
Dang! I had been so excited about the opportunity, I completely lost focus on the problem I was trying to solve.
“I want to hit the ball straighter and further,” I said in response.
“Good,” he said. “I can help you do that, but I don’t think that is why you are here.”
Now I was a bit stunned, perplexed, and feeling a little like I was about to enter a therapy session.
“I give,” I said…”Why am I here?”
“Exactly,” James said again…” Why are you here?” He didn’t answer my question for me but was going to make me answer. It was like therapy!!
Then, a light went off for me about skill. “I want to be a better golfer. No, wait, I want to lower my golf score. and I want to be more competitive on the golf course.”
“Yes!” James yelled. Literally yelled. I mean he screamed it so loud I think people having dinner at Chick-fil-A across the street could have heard him.
“Let's work to solve that problem,” James said when he calmed down. And when we got in the simulator and I would hit a ball 30 yards further with a new club, he would say, “Now that shot will lower your score on the course!”
Being Coached
James either had a natural ability or someone had trained him on some excellent coaching techniques. As I reflected on that experience, James was actually pulling from some great psychology as he was preparing me to buy golf clubs. (Hey, James had a goal, too. Make no mistake, he gets paid to sell golf clubs, and I love the set he sold me!)
RIDE*
Here is a model I use in coaching when problems that have negative emotions are brought to the discussion. I try to find a way for the person NOT to “RIDE” the negative train. I use the acronym RIDE as a process. Each element is really an independent tool, so you do not have to use them all or think of them in a stepwise fashion.
The problem I had in my golf fitting example was that I had lost my perspective on why I was there. Here is what James helped me with, even if he didn’t know the psychology behind it.
R: Remove the negative thing. This strategy employs taking the thing that is negatively impacting me out of the situation. My excitement was clouding my perspective to see why I was really there.
I: Insert a more positive perspective. This can involve distracting my attention away from the issue causing negative emotions. He took my emotion that to me felt positive - but it actually was negative because it was in my way of seeing the problem and got me to the root of why I was there in the first place.
D: Distract the attention from the negative thing. Finding something less negative can put the problem in perspective. James had me sit down, then offered me a Powerade as he was asking me about my expectations. He was distracting me away from my excitement so I could focus.
E: Emotionally Pivot. Help the person change the emotion to match the problem. James brought me down so skillfully off my high, never losing his enthusiasm, but helped me focus so that when I got in the bay I was calmer and he could do his job. Nice work, James.
How about you as a leader? If you go back to your reflection exercise at the beginning of this post, could you insert one of the elements of the RIDE model to help someone on your team?
*For all you academics out there, the RIDE model was derived from research done by Little, Gooty, and Williams and published in Leadership Quarterly 2016. The article is titled: The role of leader emotion management in leader-member exchange and follower outcomes.