Here Is Some Advice That You Can Use..Or Not

From time to time I receive questions from readers asking for advice on how to handle certain leadership situations. One thing you have to know is that I am not big on giving advice. To be able to advise, I think you need a lot of details on the situation the person finds themselves in. There are usually so many details that could sway something one way or another.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Henn in Thanks for the Feedback say that the problem with advice is that it is not specific enough. We tend to give some sage comments without giving enough detail to implement them. Or, we are such experts in something we assume that everyone knows our jargon. For example, “When you deliver your presentation make sure it stands out.” This is interesting, but what does “stand out” even mean?

The other thing that makes advice hard is that when I give it I now own the result. Since it was my idea, it is in some way on me if it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if the person didn’t follow my advice the way I laid it out, or if they took some of it, but not all of it. The advice didn’t work and I am in some way responsible. That is usually why I prefer to coach and help people find options that seem reasonable and doable for them to try versus just giving advice.

One thing I had to learn as I was growing as an executive coach, mostly the hard way, is that while coaching is in some respects about helping people solve problems, it is far from telling them what to do. It is more about what Parker Palmer calls “pulling out their inner teacher.” Helping them see options and then supporting the options they choose is, to me, more of what coaching is about.

So, when I get a question from a reader seeking advice, I usually will read it and ponder it for a week or more. I am not thinking about what the person should do in the situation described, or what I would do if I were them. Instead, my thoughts usually turn more to trying to understand the context of the situation they might be in and then coming up with some general guidelines or options they could choose.

With that in mind, I did receive a fantastic question from someone who has read this blog for years.

The Question

“How do leaders know when to intervene in order to promote better collaboration and stop the group in-fighting versus just reorganizing the department? Is there a tipping point where a simple intervention can help to resolve the issue rather than incur an expensive reorganization?”

My Thoughts

As pondered this question, I really saw two very distinct ideas emerging. The first is organizational and the second has to do with how teams function.

The organizational aspect has to do with the needs of the organization and strategically how the group is put together to meet the needs of the organization, while the team function is more about the relationships amongst the members of the group. I want to tackle these areas independently, and then bring them together for you.

The Organization

Teams are formed to meet a specific need that the organization has realized. Teams of people come together in an organized fashion to accomplish a specific set of goals or tasks. They can also come together as change agents. This allows them to move the organization from an old set of objectives to new goals that move it closer to completing its mission and making the vision a reality.

As I step back and think about the question above, if I am going to reorganize a department, then there needs to be a strategic reason. There will likely have been some change, either internally, like a new or redefined mission, or externally, like a shift in customer demands. This type of change to reorganize will be driven by forces external to the team. Something has happened that causes what the team is doing to not be as valuable to the organization. Rather than dismantle the team completely (reorganize), the team is given a new set of goals and objectives that match the external reality.

Reorganizations are chaotic, emotional, and expensive. The external pressures being experienced need to be greater than the emotional and financial cost to reorganize. Reorganizing dysfunctional people on a team only sends the dysfunction to another part of the organization. Dysfunctional people in an organization have attitudes and behaviors that are destructive and if left to their own devices will have a very bad effect on the organization. Just because an organization can afford to do it doesn’t mean that is the right thing to do.

The Relationships of the Team

If teams are not functioning well, a leader or coach has to be able to step into this moment. It takes both personal courage and a mindset that the needs of the organization outweigh any personal agendas that might exist. The leader must have the courage to call out behaviors that are not conducive to good team functioning.

General Stanley McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams, writes that “superteams” are able to construct a strong lattice of trusting relationships. He makes the point that in a true team environment, the leader needs to be less concerned with hierarchy and command; what their position is, and telling individuals what to do, and more concerned with ensuring that trusting relationships are forming so that there is a supportive network to perform.

Trust amongst team members is ensuring people are comfortable being vulnerable about weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors without fear of reprisal. So, if someone doesn’t know something, they are not judged for the lack of knowledge, but supported in getting the knowledge they need. A teammate should feel a sense of confidence to admit a weakness and have someone on the team come alongside them and say something like “Here, let me help you with that.”

There are three things I find vital for a team to be able to trust each other:

1. Cultural Integrity - As a group, we are always going to do the right thing. If someone on the team is being mean, as a team we are going to go to the person and let them know that this is not how our team behaves. We want to have them on the team, but the culture here is one of kindness and respect. Integrity matters always.

2. Comfort with Vulnerability - Teammates have to be willing to admit their weaknesses and mistakes and can never be penalized or punished when they do. If you are a person who avoids conflict, you should be able to admit this to your team and they need to come alongside and help you get better at this. The team has to believe in you and that you can help them improve. It all starts with a culture of realizing we are all human and we all fall short somewhere.

3. Confidence in the Members - No single one of us holds all the answers. Teams have to believe in the mission and have confidence in each other to tackle whatever is put before them. As individual humans, we crave safety and security. Taking risks is not always a safe feeling. This is the value of the team. As an individual, my need is for safety. The team is there to support each other to take risks and achieve much more than an individual ever could. High-performing teams have confidence in each other.

Back to the question at hand. I would argue that one of the main purposes of the leader of a team is to foster a culture of collaboration that leads to results. Not a collaboration so that every person touches everything, but trusting each other enough to know I don’t have to touch something if you are.

The leader is the person accountable if someone is not living up to the team charter of expectations. The leader should rally the team to their responsibility of pulling that person back in line. If the team won’t do it, then the leader has two jobs. One is with the team to create a culture of team discipline, and the other is with the person who is not living up to team standards by coaching them individually.

My position is that if there is a group in conflict, then the leader is accountable. Maybe if there has to be a reorganization because of this very non-strategic reason, it should come out of the leader’s bonus.

What about you? What advice would you share in response to this very interesting question? Is this advice you can use, or not? I would love your input. Thank you, Jenny, for helping us all think.

Two Helpful Tools for Improving Team Health

A few years ago I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become healthier as this team.

They were by all accounts high performing - made up of “top guns” from the industry. They were a group whose contact list went three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They had done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. They were hitting all of their yearly goals by the third quarter of that year.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. When there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility.

This is when there is a chance for performance to increase

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I had a conversation with a physician friend about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a race. This race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the athletes is really important. The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55, and that of the 20 runners, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undue stress on one aspect of the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization that hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see their performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then develop some new ways of going about their work.

Two Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are: by providing opportunities for exploration and for advancement.

1. Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be better listeners. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time in which they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions and each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen to.

   The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but know that the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The takeaway for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others on the team and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

2. Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized and awfulize the issues. So if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “It is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use exploration and advancement tools to improve the health of your team.

2 Helpful Tools for Improving Team Health

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become healthier.

The team by all accounts was high performing - made up of “top guns” from the industry. A group whose contact list goes three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They have done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. Hitting all their yearly goals by the third quarter.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. That when there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility and performance can increase.

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I was having a conversation with a physician friend once about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a marathon race. The race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the runners is really important.

The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55 and of the 20, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undue stress on one aspect of the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization that hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see their performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then develop some new ways of going about their work.

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are by providing opportunities for exploration and advancement.

Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be a better listener. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time in which they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions and each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen.

The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The takeaway for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized the issues and they became more awful. So, if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “it is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use exploration and advancement to improve the health of your team.

2 Helpful Tools for Improving Team Health

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become more healthy.

The team by all accounts was high performing - made up of “top guns” from the industry. A group whose contact list (Rolodex, for those of you who still own flip phones), goes three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They have done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. Hitting all their yearly goals by the third quarter.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. That when there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility and performance can increase.

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I was having a conversation with a physician friend recently about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a marathon race. The race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the runners is really important. The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55, and that of the 20, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undo stress on one aspect in the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization who hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then to develop some new ways of going about their work.

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are by providing opportunities for exploration and advancement.

Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be better listeners. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and to focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time where they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions where each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen.

The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but that the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The take away for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized and awfulize the issues. So if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “it is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use Exploration and Advancement to improve the health on your team.

2 Effective Tools for Improving Team Health

Last year I had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become more healthy.

The team by all accounts is high performing. It is made up of “top guns” from the industry. A group whose contact list (Rolodex, for those of you who still own flip phones), goes three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They have done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. Hitting all their yearly goals by the third quarter.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. That when there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility and performance can increase.

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I was having a conversation with a physician friend recently about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a marathon race. The race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the runners is really important. The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55, and that of the 20, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undo stress on one aspect in the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization who hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then to develop some new ways of going about their work.

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are by providing opportunities for exploration and advancement.

Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be better listeners. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and to focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time where they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions where each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen.

The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but that the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The take away for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized and awfulize the issues. So if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “it is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use Exploration and Advancement to improve the health on your team.

2 Effective Tools for Improving Team Health

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become more healthy.

The team by all accounts is high performing. It is made up of “top guns” from the industry. A group whose contact list (Rolodex, for those of you who still own flip phones), goes three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They have done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. Hitting all their yearly goals by the third quarter.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. That when there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility and performance can increase.

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I was having a conversation with a physician friend recently about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a marathon race. The race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the runners is really important. The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55, and that of the 20, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undo stress on one aspect in the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization who hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then to develop some new ways of going about their work.

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are by providing opportunities for exploration and advancement.

Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be better listeners. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and to focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time where they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions where each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen.

The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but that the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The take away for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized and awfulize the issues. So if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “it is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use Exploration and Advancement to improve the health on your team.

Here is a method for helping leaders reduce organizational tension.

Have you ever heard the phrase “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country about of the boy?” You probably have, or at least a variation of it. It's a common saying, because of the truth behind it: We all have a cultural upbringing and background that cannot be easily ignored or changed.

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The culture we grew up in is a foundational part of who we are and provides much of our leadership frame. The culture we are exposed to as infants, children, and young adults forms the values, beliefs, and social norms we carry around as adults today. This cultural development is so integral to who we are that it can cause us to behave in ways that we see as entirely normal, but others may look at and say, “what planet did you come from?“

Culture is influential and inevitable in shaping every single person in this world.

According to Michael Polanyi (my favorite science philosopher), “…as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse.” Everything we do as leaders is culturally situated by our entire human experience: race, sex, economic class, family of origin, family dynamics, teachers, coaches, friends. It all has an impact on how you see the world and how you lead.

Last week, I was at a conference speaking about leadership and the impact our emotional intelligence has on performance. Questions about the clash of cultures came up in our group discussions. Some of the participants observed that the culture of their company didn't completely align with their cultural background. The company, for example, values expression of emotion as a way to show vulnerability and authenticity. This created tension as the individual who raised the issue grew up in a family culture that valued performance without emotion, “just the facts." The young lady said when she was a teenager there was no empathizing with how hard a class was, just deliver the “A."

This young lady felt trapped between the successful model she was taught as a young person and the new culture of empathy and connectedness. I have to tell you, the tension in the room was palpable and the struggle for learning to navigate this dynamic seemed unyielding.

What we talked about as a group is the fact that the impact our formative culture has on our behavior is not something can easily change without full awareness and willing intention. In fact, it may not be a full-on change that is needed, but more skill in navigating between the two cultural dynamics. This is a real value for the discipline of Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence encompasses your ability to create space in a situation and make a behavioral choice rather than acting impulsively. Being emotionally intelligent equips you to assess the cultural tension, adapt to a culture, and even affect a culture with good leadership and team cooperation.

There is a lot that can be learned here from Young Yun Kim’s cross-cultural adaptation theory of "stress-adapt-grow." For example, the higher a leader's emotional intelligence, the more equipped they are to recognize the impact that the cultural stress is having on them. Self-awareness to understand there is a difference allows the leader to be able to feel the stress and deal with it rather than ignore it and let it mount.

If stress mounts to a point that can not be tolerated, all sorts of negative consequences are possible. If the stress is managed, then adaptation to the new culture is possible. Learning the emotional intelligence skill of emotional expression, for example, will allow this young leader to value both her culture of origin and her culture of destiny. When she adapts, she can grow to a place where she can feel less stress about the cultural differences. She will have grown as a leader without having to give up core aspects of who she is as a person.

Our theme for this month is going to focus on organizational culture issues. We look forward to a deeper conversation about the positive outcomes that may be achieved when you use emotional intelligence in any cultural situation.

Homework

Is there some place where you are feeling stress in your organizational leadership? Examine your culture of origin and compare it to your culture of destiny. Is there a place where growing your emotional intelligence could help you see the stress in a different light? Could you gain skills to help you adapt and grow? Look for places of friction in your work and see if it might have something to do with the clash of cultures.