Are you in a Mini, Major, or Stormy Transition?

Many of the organizations I work with are going through major transitions right now. Some are growing and expanding while others are experiencing unprecedented contraction. The change seems to be showing up in a couple of very different ways.

Some folks are in mini-transition where they are gaining clarity around their life’s work; like an update of what has been happening in their lives over the past several years. These folks find themselves doing a new job, or on a new team, or maybe even relocating for an opportunity. It is a change they may or may not have been asking for, but alas they find themselves with some new opportunities ahead. While significant, and full of emotion, these mini-transitions keep the person on a similar life trajectory.

Then there are the life-impacting transitions where full-on change is happening in your life. Your circumstances are shifting entirely and rocking your entire world!

• You have lost your job, through no fault of your own.

• You have decided to retire and to give your talents to a local non-profit who really needs your leadership.

• Your spouse has served you divorce papers after 25 years of marriage.

• Or you experience the loss of a child.

Real loss. Devastating loss. The kind of loss that makes life seem like there is no way out.

Frederick Hudson writes, “…many people think of transitions [like this] as a penalty box, a place for losers, for quitters and weaklings-people who can’t take the heat, victims who thrive on self-pity and helplessness.” Many will seek to blame others; a bad boss, a spouse, or more likely God.

When you lose something you love, a job or a person it can seem like life itself is not worth living. Hudson writes, “the acceptance of an ending sounds like termination, humiliation, resignation, and defeat.”

However deep or devastating your transition, please take heart. However disorientating the change you are encountering, this experience is almost always a road to some kind of regenerative growth of you as a person and a discovery of some new and exciting you that is being created.

You really are a butterfly emerging from a cocoon…eventually.

But for now, it might feel like you are a caterpillar who just wants go into the basement, drink beer, and cry!

What to be aware of is how you are experiencing your transformation. Think of it as “The Meantime.”

The Meantime

When I was a kid, my mom used to talk a lot about the meantime. It was always mentioned as a time preparation as a transition was coming. It would go something like this:   

• “Scott your father will be home in about an hour and in the MEANTIME you better get your room picked up.”  

• “Scott you have basketball practice tomorrow morning and in the MEANTIME you better get your gym bag packed.”

• “Eric (my brother) you have your piano lesson tonight, in the MEANTIME you better get practicing.”

As I reflect back when I was a kid the MEANTIME was always a time of storming. You see, I knew dad would be home in an hour, but a kid could play a lot of basketball in 60 minutes. Who in their right mind wants to stop playing ball and clean up there room?

The storm would begin to brew.

My mom would remind me. “You better get on it now. You can play ball when your room is done, but in the MEANTIME you better get moving."

After the second request to clean my room, she would invoke my middle name.

“Scott Robert!”

The pressure would rise with dad’s presence looming on the horizon. The stormy transition was fast approaching.  

We all experience stormy space in our meantime; the space that exists between “how nice it was before the transition” and “what it will be like when the transition is over.”

The question I have been asking myself a lot lately is, “When the meantime comes, how do I show up?”

Leaders, we need to be very aware of how we are showing up during times of transition. We need to ask ourselves what our behavior was like during the stormy transition. Are my actions those of a self-centered protectionist?

Am I becoming so focused on my own unfortunate circumstances that I am missing out on key relationships that could be a vehicle to restore my healing? Can I remain calm and have some clear thinking, vision, and self-introspection as events unfold around me?

Many of you are experiencing change and chaos going like never before. So, over the next several weeks I am going to write about going through these changes with skill and grace. Next week, I’m going to dive deeper in how to work through stormy transitions such as grief and loss.

I hope you enjoy the support. If you know of someone going through transition, why not send them the blog and encourage them to sign up. I would greatly appreciate it.

Don’t Make The Same Mistake I Did

During a recent 360 feedback event, where leaders receive feedback from their supervisor, peers, and direct reports, one of the leaders came up to me afterward. She said, “Scott, my feedback is telling me I need to have better interpersonal relationships, especially with my peers. Can you give me some advice on how I can improve in this area?"

My knee-jerk reaction was to provide advice from my training and experience so I began rattling off my instructions. I gave a step-by-step plan to this young leader what she needed to do to have mutually satisfying relationships. After all, in my training and coaching practice, I have developed a near effortless perspective in this area. As an executive coach with a doctoral dissertation in executive coaching, I assumed I knew what the problem was.

Thankfully, I noticed the blank stare on this young leader’s face. She was completely overwhelmed.

I FELL INTO THE TRAP OF THE LEADERSHIP EXPERT

I stopped mid-sentence, shifted my thinking, and asked, ”When it comes to interpersonal relationships, what doesn’t seem right to you?” The young leader went on for about 3-minutes describing her thoughts and analysis. She explained how she felt spending time on “chit-chat” was not productive in the midst of her busy day. For example, when she had a meeting she skipped pleasantries and got right down to business. She wondered aloud if this was a possible disconnect with her peers.

Asking this woman a simple question allowed her emotional space to verbalize ways she needed to improve her interpersonal relationships. I had forgotten that most young leaders are just beginning their journey. They are still getting used to the language of leadership. They are receiving feedback, many of them for the first time. Where I am in my practice and where they are as young leaders are two entirely different places.

THOSE I LEAD ARE AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

Scientists claim that it takes at least 10,000 hours of study, experimentation, and practice paired with coaching and advice from individuals in that field before you become an expert in an area.

10,000 hours equals 6 years spent on the subject full-time, 8 hours a day, 200 days per year. Few of us have dedicated this kind of time to a field, so for most of us, it takes 10 to 12 years to develop our expertise.

Have you fallen into the same trap I did? Are you holding young leaders to a high standard of evaluation?

Edgar Schein, in his book Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, gives leaders sage advice when leadership conversations go wrong.

1. Do less telling.

2. Learn to do more asking.

3. Do a better job of listening.

Here are three suggestions to practically implement Schein’s advice:

1. Do less telling by learning to let go of your need to be heard as an expert. What is driving your need to be right or heard? Replace your directive style with an inquiry.

2. Learn to do more asking by making your questions open-ended. “What doesn’t seem right to you” or “Tell me more about what you are saying."

3. Do a better job of listening by practicing empathy. Give them your full, undivided attention while keeping in mind where they are in their development.

Think of a relationship you have struggled with at work. The next time you are in conversation with this person, give up your expert position and ask some open-ended questions instead. Focus on improving the strained relationship. Let go of the outcome of the subject you are working on and focus on the quality of your questions and your listening ability. By making this kind of investment in others, your work may actually become easier.

If you have some success with this I would love to hear about it. Send me an email or better yet make a comment below so everyone can benefit from the conversation.

Are You Intentional About This?

An old friend recently called me and told me about her work. Her company really values leadership and sees it as a competitive advantage in the marketplace, but they view personal development as the individual's responsibility. Much like how they expect my friend to dress business casual when she comes to work, but they are not going to take her shopping.

You may work in an organization that takes a more proactive approach and provides classes to attend or gives you a budget to spend on yourself for your own development. You may even work in an organization that doesn't care about your development at all, they just want the job done.

No matter what type of organization you work with, planning your own development as a leader is paramount to your improvement. We can not simply hope that we will improve or leave our development to chance.

So, what exactly does development look like? Development is about:

• Growth as a person

• Finding a new skill

• Advancing yourself

• Creating something new and exciting

• Breaking out of the routine so that you become the person YOU desire to be

Perhaps you want to improve your position or your skills, yet you just are hoping that it will happen. Hope is a poor outcome predictor. Instead of hoping something will happen we need to intentionally engage others in our development.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE

You are conversing with a peer while waiting for a meeting to start. You say, "Hey, I am trying to speak less in meetings, but when I do speak, I am going to try to have more influence. My goal is to draw others to my ideas, rather than beat them into submission with my words. Could you observe me over the next few months and give me some feedback on how I am doing?" Admitting we need to develop something brings us face to face with the reality that if we do not make a change we will be stuck where we are for a long time. This takes courage and vulnerability.

Being intentional with your development allows you to go to other leaders, and even followers of yours, asking them to partner with you in the creation of the more advanced you. This may be scary, but so is skydiving, or running your first half-marathon, or going on your first date. Scary in an exhilarating sort of way. It demonstrates a healthy and respectful fear.

Sharing an aspect of your leadership development plan allows three important things to occur:

1. You are declaring that leading is important to you.

2. You are showing humility.

3. You are saying to others that stagnation is NOT OK with you.

If you are collecting feedback by involving others in your development I want to encourage you to pay attention to the accompanying emotion. Are you feeling sad or encouraged? Are you motivated or discouraged? No matter the emotion you are feeling, focus on what is being said and how you can use it to improve your leadership.

So, how are you involving others in your personal development? I’d love to hear your comments around the topic of intentionally developing yourself as a leader.

How Does Risk Affect Your Team’s Performance?

Do you think risk and reward go together? Or is the reward is an outcome of risk, not a partner in the dynamic interplay of teams? Let's say someone on your team is driven by risk and we suppose they are carefree. Someone else on the team is risk-averse and we categorize them as wary. Now the team has to make a decision on a product or how to put a presentation together. The carefree person wants to go for it. The wary person wants to hold back. Depending on team dynamics, the team may find themselves out of balance or even stuck. As a result, emotions rise, people stop understanding each other and often begin looking for blame.

The stuck feeling the team is experiencing has nothing to do with talent or skill. The team is not performing in the moment because they all have a different tolerance for risk. Risk brings with it, as change does, a certain emotional tone and tenor. We each have a tolerance for risk. As that tolerance becomes challenged, our emotion, anxiety, and fear can all increase. The we feel the less risky something is to us.

There are 8 different types of risk profiles. As a leader, understanding these risk types will help you navigate team dynamics and maximize the risk profiles of each member on your team.

8 RISK TYPES

Excitable

At the root of this is impulsivity and an attraction to risk, combined with distress and regret if things go wrong. This type tends to be passionate and fluctuates between excited-enthusiasm and pessimistic-negativity. Such people are both frightened and excited by their impulsiveness. They are likely to respond emotionally to events and react strongly to disappointment or unexpected moments.

Intense

Those who fall into this dimension tend to be anxious and worrisome. People in this risk type expect the worst, they are high-strung and alert to any risk or threat to their wellbeing. They are emotionally invested in their decisions and commitments and take it personally when things don’t work out. They tend to be very passionate about things, but their mood can swing drastically from day to day.

Wary

Characterized by a combination of self-discipline and concern about risk, these are cautious, organized people who highly prioritize security. They are likely to be alert to the risk aspect of any investment opportunity before pressing into any potential benefits. These people have a strong desire to know exactly what to expect, and, as a result, may find it difficult to make decisions.

Prudent

Those in the prudent risk type have a high-level of self-control. This type is organized, systematic, and conforming. Conservative and conventional in their approach, such people prefer continuity to variety and are most comfortable operating within established and familiar procedures. They are generally very cautious and suspicious of any new ventures and may find reassurance in sticking with what they know.

Deliberate

These individuals have high-levels of calm self-confidence combined with caution. This type tends to be unusually low-key, even in situations where most people would panic. At times, they seem almost too accepting of risk and uncertainty. However, they are often well balanced by a desire to do things in a planned and systematic way. Because they are highly organized, compliant, and like to be fully informed about what is going on, they are unlikely to walk into anything unprepared.

Composed

This type is cool-headed, calm, and unemotional, but at the extreme may seem almost oblivious to risk. Their outlook will always be optimistic. These people take everything in stride and appear to manage stress very well. They are not particularly impulsive but are also not overly organized or systematic.

Adventurous

At the root of this risk type is a combination of impulsiveness and fearlessness. Extreme examples of this type are people who have a disregard for custom, tradition, or convention. They are seemingly oblivious to risk. Their decision-making is likely to be influenced by both their lack of anxiety and their impulsiveness.

Carefree

Those in this category dislike repetitive routine and do not like being told what to do. Such people may seem excitement-seeking and, in extreme cases, reckless. Lack of attention to detail and preparation may cause their intentions and objectives to seem vague. Their impatience, impulsivity, and distractibility sometimes leave them exposed to hasty decisions.

These risk types all come from an assessment that is published by Multi-Health Systems called Compass Risk Type. The tool is designed to assess the individual risk type of each person on a team and then give the team a picture as a whole. As we design workshops around this Compass Risk Type Indicator it is always interesting for a team to look at a current issue they face, and each other’s Risk Type, and work through possible solutions.

There is potential for risk in almost everything we do, and there are many different factors that influence a person’s readiness to take a risk at any particular moment. As leaders, we must be aware of the way those on our team interpret and respond to risk, beginning with ourselves.

The next time your team is stuck in making a decision, look at the list of risk-types and ask if the source of the stall could be attributed to a different approach to risk.

Does Your Culture of Origin Affect Your Leadership?

A while ago, I was at a conference speaking about leadership and how our Emotional Intelligence impacts performance. In the group discussion, questions surfaced regarding the clash of cultures. One participant observed the culture of her company did not align with her cultural background. Her company valued expression of emotion as a way to show vulnerability and authenticity, but this created tension as it was the opposite of her family culture which valued performance without emotion. “Just the facts," the young lady said. No empathy was expressed with difficult classes as she was growing up. “Just deliver the ‘A’ grade.”

This young woman felt trapped between the performance model she was taught as a youth and the new professional 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.

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?“ How can one deal with the stress of valuing their culture of origin, yet pressing into a different culture that requires an increase in Emotional Intelligence?

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

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, and friends. It all has an impact on how you see the world and how you lead. Culture is influential and inevitable in shaping every single person in this world.

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 an unfamiliar way of life, and even affect an environment with good leadership and team cooperation.

Much can be learned 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 the 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 cannot be tolerated, all sorts of negative consequences are possible. If stress is managed, then adaptation to the new culture is possible. Learning the Emotional Intelligence skill of healthy emotional expression will empower 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 grow as a leader without having to give up core elements of who she is as a person.

What would help you see the tension between your culture of origin and culture of destiny in a different light? Look for places of friction in your work and see if it might have something to do with the clash of cultures. If there is potential for improvement in Emotional Intelligence take some healthy strides toward understanding the differences between the cultures and grow as a leader.

10 C's Checklist to Decide if You Have an Effective Team (Part 2)

Last week, I opened the conversation about Effective Teams and challenged you to think critically about your own team. If you missed the first 5 C’s Checklist, click here to get caught up.

As promised, here are the remaining 5 C’s:
...And don’t forget to click the free download at the end!

6. Competent members.  Every team has to have people with enough skill and intellect to get the job done. Notice this does not say you need Perfect People, or The Smartest People, or The Best Looking People. You need people who can get the job done that align with the vision. This competence extends to a lesson I learned when I was about 4 years old. Everybody wants to play with the nice kid in the sandbox. Nobody wants to play with the arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic bully in the sandbox. All our adult lives we have been told this lie; that our organization is a zero-sum game. Which comes from an attitude of scarcity. The reason we organize as humans is that we can do more if we have each other. Stop threatening to take your sand bucket and go home if you don’t get your way. Start being nice to people, relax…go have lunch. Start behaving like you are part of an abundant world and that there is enough around for us all to eat like kings.

7. Coaching for results with a high standard of excellence. Coaching is a word that is getting a lot of play these days. It can mean anything from being directive and telling a person exactly what you want them to do (think football coach), to very supportive and delegating tasks without fear of being let down, and everything in between. In this idea of coaching, the coach bases their direction style on the needs of the person being coached. Yet keeping a high standard of excellence is key, not a matter of style. For me, coaching is all about helping the person see around a corner they are getting ready to turn and they have no idea what awaits them. There are times when the coach knows exactly what is going to happen to the individual and can help them prepare for what is coming next. There are other times when neither the coach nor the teammate knows what is around the bend. This is where the coach can get curious and at least brainstorm with the person what to expect and how to best handle whatever comes at them. The reason I like coaching so much is that it really helps to get rid of blame in organizations and focus more on opportunities that exist.

8. Confidence among members. Not one of us holds all the answers. In today’s complex organizations this is just not possible. We need to be able to ask each other questions and then listen to what the person has to say. This give and take, where one person is curious about something and then shows the ability to focus and pay attention and listen to the response, is a real key to team performance. If we are interacting like this, then I know that I can count on you to be there when it matters. Life is not perfect, things happen. If we run our teams knowing that someone has our backs when we fail, then others are more likely to reciprocate the deed when we might need it most. It is only on a team that is confident and comfortable that risks can be taken. As humans, we crave safety and security. Taking a risk isn’t safe, it is often scary and unpredictable. Knowing that you are there to support me if I fall helps me to be able to take my first step. High performing teams have confidence in each other.

9. Commitment to unity. I used to frame my thoughts around team strength using a skill model. My thinking went something like, “The team is only as strong as its weakest link.” I have to admit I was heavily influenced in my early management life by Jack Welch who had a model of ranking teammates from A (best) to (D) worst. Jack said to reward the A’s and get rid of the D’s. I have really changed my thinking on this over the last 20 years. Getting rid of people does not create unity. It only causes fear that “I might be next.” How I see team unity now is more around the philosophy of "a team is only as good as the least committed member.” I also believe it is up to the leader to create this level of commitment and to foster a spirit of “We are going to win or we are going to lose, that much I know. I also know whether we win or whether we lose we are going to do it together.”

10. Collaborative environment. No working environment is perfect. Everyone gets their feelings hurt from time to time. The worst thing that can happen on a team is that silos form and an “us versus them” mentality is created. Organizations are so complex that it is imperative that the culture remains collaborative even in the face of conflict. A spirit of collaboration says I care as much about your goals and the organization as you care about mine. I want you to win. I want you to succeed. I want you to be able to be the very best version of yourself that you can be. If I can help you with your goals and your goals are linked to the organization obtaining its vision and I truly believe in the vision, then why wouldn’t I help you? The enemy here is selfish ambition. We have to put away our own selfishness and arrogance and realize that these are going to leave us and everyone short of what they are trying to achieve. An effective team collaborates.

So, those are my top 10 C's to decide if you have an effective team.  Why not sit down and reflect on this list and really think through how your team is doing? Where are the places that you exceed expectations and are cause for celebration? Where are the gaps that need to be shored up?

If I came in and observed your team for a day, what would I find? If we used this checklist as a 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale how would your group fare? The other question that comes to mind is what if you rated your team and then I rated your team, would there be any differences? Sometimes leaders need outside perspective to see if what they are really seeing and experiencing is valid.

Care to take the challenge? If so, click HERE for a free printable download of this checklist. Use this with your team and let me know what you discover.

10 C's Checklist to Decide If You Have an Effective Team (Part 1)

Many years ago when I led my own sales team, I rarely thought deeply about what it took for a team to be effective. Honestly, I thought that if you worked hard and held people accountable to do what they said they were going to do, then that was enough. However, most of the teams I am working with today have people who work really hard, and yet they struggle.

Working with teams has caused me to stop and reflect on the subject of their effectiveness in an organization. Some have leaders who are willing to hold the team accountable, and yet they just don’t seem to be performing. They seem to be leaving things on the table that could really help them achieve at a high level.

I took some time to dig into the literature to see what I could find on topics like high performing teams, trust, goal setting, and the like. I have linked this with some of my recent experiences. Next week, I’ll include a free download with the remainder of my checklist, but for now, here are the first 5 C’s of my thoughts on high performing teams.

1. Clarity of purpose. Teams need to see the link between the overall vision, the mission of the organization, and the tactical implementation plans. Put your vision all over the place. If you are a leader, talk about it every day with everyone you meet. If you think you are being repetitive and people will get bored…fear not. Frankly, I would prefer boredom, yet headed in the right direction, than excited and clueless about where they are going. Shout your vision from the roof-top and put it where everyone can see it. Remind your folks of it in the morning when they come to work, and in the evening when they go home. Talk about it in your 5-minute huddles as you start the day, in your hour-long staff meetings, and at your leadership retreats. Never lose frequency on communicating the vision of where you are taking people in your organization.

2. Co-created goals. After you plaster your vision everywhere, put up tactical goal boards. Goals are what people should be held accountable for in organizations. Meet them and celebrate like crazy. See yourself falling short and do an early correction. If you wait too long, you may be leaving no possible way you will hit them. Every office and cubicle should have a goal board so that whoever comes into the workspace can clearly see what is being worked on and what the person is accountable to produce. My high school basketball coach used to do this with free-throw shooting. We had a board in the locker room and after practice, we had to shoot free throws, write our percentage goal, and then our actual number made. If you consistently hit your goal then the percentage went up. The only way to know this was to keep score. I have a goal score sheet in my coaching and consulting practice that I look at every Monday with my assistant, Brandi. She is responsible for holding me accountable for my percentage of progress to my goals. Hopefully, you have someone on your team that you are talking with on a regular basis about your goals and how you are doing toward them.

3. Comfort with vulnerability. By vulnerable I mean a willingness to admit weakness and mistakes. Become confident in sharing what you struggle with. If you are a conflict avoider, then admit it and ask folks to help you with it. If you have an ego or a temper…just know we all have something. Admit your shortcomings and ask folks who are really skilled at empathy, or have a calm presence, to help you along. What I DO NOT mean by vulnerable is using your weakness as an excuse to behave poorly. Let’s face it since all of us have shortcomings, none of us care that much what yours are. Weaknesses are not excuses for character flaws to be accepted, but opportunities for connecting with others from which to learn and grow.

4. Common enemy. I think this one relates back to the visioning component. What I have found is that even people who would describe themselves as noncompetitive love to win. My lovely wife would describe herself as a noncompetitive personality. However, I can assure you that if you get her in a game of “Quirkle” she will try and destroy you as fast as she can (in a loving and kind sort of way, of course). Look, if people naturally want to compete, why not give them a target to compete against. Stop fighting with each other over who has the best idea or is getting the biggest bonus or the most funding. Remember the game you are playing.  To all my friends in healthcare out there, stop worrying about who has the most department resources and go cure cancer…please!

5. Cultural integrity. Last week I did an Organization Culture assessment for a group who is integrating two very different cultures. I was reminded during my presentation of the famous quote by management guru Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!” For me, any leader who is forming a culture based on honesty and trust is really focused on the right thing. Recall that trust is made up of both a cognitive and affective component. Cognitive trust is basically procedural fairness; can folks count on you to do what you say you are going to do? Affective trust is the emotional connection we feel that stems from care and compassion. A culture, no matter the stereotype; be it family oriented or more entrepreneurial, will live successfully if it is built on a foundation of integrity. It will not always be easy, but it will always be consistent and people will feel valued.

How is your team doing with these first 5 C’s? Don’t forget, next week I’ll give my final 5 C’s to decide if you have an effective team, plus a free download.

5 Questions to Assess Your Social Responsibility

The competency of social responsibility asks if there is anything emotionally holding you back from serving others. Social responsibility is a desire, an ability, and a volition. When I bring this topic up with clients the response I usually get is that I am giving them a “guilt trip."

Is it healthy to be the focus of your own life and the center of your universe? My guess is that none of us want to feel this way. However, the busier we become, the more self-absorbed we seem to get and the flow of our leadership lives suffers.

My point here is not to make you feel bad about your level of social responsibility, but rather to get you thinking about how are you balancing your selfish ambition. Most of us as leaders are trying to find a flow between work, family, recreation, and faith. Where does service fit in for you? If you dedicate too much to any one of these areas, the flow becomes restricted in other places.

Will you take action as a leader even though you might not benefit personally? Do you have a sense of accepting others and using your talents as a leader for the good of society and not only yourself? I don’t know how that hits you, but it actually stings a little for me. Of course, we have the skill. Yes, most of us in our hearts want to. The question is, what is holding us back from acting?

Because we are not the center of the universe, competencies such as social responsibility are vital in any model for leadership. If you read this blog on any regular basis you know that one of the best leadership models, uses emotional intelligence.

One such model for emotional intelligence that incorporates this idea of social responsibility is the EQ-i 2.0 by Reuven Bar-On. According to the EQ-i 2.0, emotional intelligence is defined in the user’s manual as, “a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”

Most of the time when I speak to folks about emotional intelligence, their thoughts immediately turn inward to our personal emotion. Or perhaps they turn to a difficult relationship, a place where we are struggling relationally in our lives. Very few of us relate our emotional intelligence to our social consciousness.

Steve Stein and Howard Book, in their book on emotional intelligence called The EQ Edge, describe social responsibility as "A desire and ability to willingly contribute to society, your social group, and generally to the welfare of others."

Are you willing to test your desire and ability to willingly contribute to society?

If so, here are five questions you can ask yourself to assess your own level of social responsibility:

1. What community organizations am I currently involved in outside of my paid vocation? (Involved means regularly serving, not that your name is merely on a list).

2. What active role am I currently playing to make the organization better?

3. What did I do this week to lend a hand to someone who could use it?

4. How many examples can I cite in the last month where I was sensitive to the needs of friends, co-workers, or my boss?

5. Do I participate in charitable events?

We are never successful on our own. Real success comes from our work as a contributing member of a team or society. Having a caring and compassionate heart is a great balance for high levels of self-regard, that if left unchecked, could fall into arrogance.

After you take the assessment, talk to your spouse, significant other, coach, or a complete stranger about how you are doing. Do you have any changes you need to make to become more socially conscious? Your leadership depends on it.

Open with Caution...Do You Trust Me?

“I just don’t know where they are coming from” lamented Julie. “Of course I am trustworthy. How could they think I am not?” The tension in the room was rising as she was reading the summary of her leadership 360 feedback report.  

“I take good care of all of the people on the team, walking around asking about how they are doing. I ask about their kids and what they did fun over the weekend. I mean I work hard at showing genuine concern for them.”

Julie continued with simmering anger underneath her words. “I mean I don’t question them at all when they have to leave in the middle of the afternoon when the school calls and one of the kids are in the principal’s office sick and needs to be picked up immediately. In fact, I am actually proactive and tell them, ‘Go we will cover whatever you have to do, just go and take care of your family.’’’

As I listened to Julie struggle with the feedback, I sat back and said to myself, you know she does sound like she has care and compassion and a genuine concern.  But the 360 is saying that there are those on her team that do not trust her.

Where is the disconnect?

I reflected back on previous clients who also received feedback revealing trust as a potential issue in their leadership.

My thoughts turned to Tim whose team said that he was the most dependable manager anyone could ever have. If you ever needed anything all you had to do was ask Tim and he was there for you. Tim got great accolades for being reliable, whether you were in crisis or just needed to talk something out. Tim struggled when he was reading his 360 feedback and trying to process the disconnect between being dependable and reliable, yet being seen as not being fully trustworthy.

How is it that two leaders, one who is seen as showing concern, care, and compassion and the other who clearly demonstrates reliability and dependability both be seen as not being able to be trusted?

Well, it turns out that trust, or what those in our organizations perceive as trust, are rooted in two parts of our brain; our cognitive thinking, and our emotional feeling abilities.

Trust has, as a component of its formation, something called psychological safety. In order for your team to trust you, they need to both KNOW and FEEL that they are safe. Psychological safety is the portion of our being that says all is well. You can be free to be yourself. No harm is going to come to you, this is an open and judgment-free zone.

Experts have found this psychological safety is built on a couple of important foundations. The first is that the leader is able to develop cognition-based trust. This is the type of trust that Tim was giving himself such high marks for demonstrating. Tim indeed received excellent marks for being dependable and reliable. But something was missing.

And the second type, like Julie, who was perceived as not fully trustworthy by her team even though she was demonstrating strong affect-based trust abilities. These strengths are based on emotional bonds of care, compassion, and concern between people. Even though she demonstrated affect-based trust, Julie was missing something.

Well by now you have guessed it.

Julie was missing that cognitive-based trust from her team. While she was great at caring and demonstrating compassion, she was unreliable. She was often triple booked on her calendar and members of her team would need her support in meetings or presentations and Julie was nowhere to be found. Julie could not be trusted to show up.

And while Tim was a dependable manager who had an open door policy, walking into his office was another matter entirely. Tim, being an intellectual and (literally) the smartest guy in the room, would give people on his team the feeling they were insignificant by intimidating them, never asking questions, or showing empathy, just quick with an opinion on what should be done. Tim could not be trusted to care.

So what about you as a leader? Are you able to display both aspects of trust, cognitive and affective? Do you find yourself relying more on one and apologizing for the other?

Trust is a really big deal in leadership (blinding glimpse of the obvious here). Most leaders I meet would never say they are not trustworthy and they often will cite one aspect or the other of the psychological safety equation.

Which side do you lean toward? Cognitive or affective? Is it time you gave full consideration to what goes into driving trust with your team?

4 Ways to Avoid Being an Instapot Leader

Last week I encouraged leaders to think about how receiving feedback can be an opportunity to capitalize on personal growth. If you want to go back and review the post, or if you missed it entirely, you can click here and get caught up.

Utilizing feedback doesn’t get enough attention in organizations. Most of the emphasis is placed on making sure leaders have feedback. Ok. Great. We are spending money making sure they have the information, but how are we investing and supporting them in processing the gift they receive?

In organizations, we treat feedback like getting an Instapot for Christmas. This complicated pressure cooking device has more buttons than my TV remote control (which I don’t know all those buttons either). The instructions on the Instapot are so complicated and overwhelming, there is genuine fear of blowing spaghetti sauce all over the living room if you press the wrong button!

Receiving feedback from organizations could be compared to the fear of pressing the wrong button on the Instapot. All of this data comes in and you hold the instructions in your hands not quite sure what to do with it. You may struggle with being completely overwhelmed, or even feeling paralyzed if the proper processing support is not provided. All of this feedback is well-intentioned, but is it helpful if the leader doesn’t get the chance to really take the time to understand what the feedback is saying?

When working with clients who are getting organizational feedback, there are four key elements that will help them process the information:

1. Ownership:  How emotionally dependent or independent are they on what others are saying? Are they trying to fit in and be like everyone else? Or are they in control, and not overwhelmed by the emotion they are feeling from the feedback? A leader with ownership can tolerate people not liking them or agreeing with everything they say.

2. Empathetic Understanding: Are they able to see the feedback from the perspective it was given? They don’t have to agree with it, but can they contextualize it? The goal isn’t to fix everything right away, but to understand the feedback and take some steps toward processing change.

3. Rigid Stance: The polar ends of this spectrum are performance and relationship. On one end, the leader focuses so heavily on tasks that they cannot see relationships are damaged. On the other end, the leader is so focused on relationship nothing ever gets done.This usually shows as justification for whatever behavior the feedback has uncovered.

4. Self-Regard: How well does the person know themselves, their strengths, and their weaknesses? Are they attuned to their natural gifts and using them to achieve their calling in life? Do they understand their position and are they working to strengthen their organizational voice? If not, they are more than likely on the other end of the spectrum, which is a lack of acknowledging strengths and using victim voice.

As we use the gift of feedback in organizations, we should also work with our leaders on how to process the gift. We need to help them contextualize and get the full breadth of the feedback before we run to an action plan to fix anything. Most of the time, nothing is really broken. In my experience, most development work comes from overplayed strengths. While the changes might seem monumental, the person receiving feedback is more-or-less experimenting with slight modifications and practicing their newfound insights.

Do you know someone who has recently received feedback or are you in the process of giving feedback? Helping them process feedback will go a long way to revealing the gift of becoming the person they desire to be.

3-Step Recipe for a Productivity Reset

Question: When is the last time you experienced a productivity reset?

I read recently that in a knowledge-working society the work we do is really about creativity.  Now, when I hear the word creativity my mind immediately goes to the painters and sculptors of the world. And for sure the work they do is creative. 

But before those of us who are scientists, technologists, and managers or leaders abdicate the world of creativity to the artists, we probably should step back for a moment and make sure we are not leaving the best part of us behind.

The Story

I recently had a conversation with one of my graduate students who said she was completely burned out and didn’t know how she was going to get her research project finished on time.  She was definitely in need of a productivity reset.

Here is a part of our conversation: “…by the time I finish my commute to and from work I am logging 60 hours or more a week. In addition, I have a family and my church that are both really important to me. I just don’t have any energy left for creativity to get this research project finished.”

I could just sense the frustration and disappointment in her voice as she was trying to figure out how to be more productive. Then almost without taking a breath, she said, “…You know, perhaps I could be more efficient in the morning. If I got up an hour earlier I could get more done because I am at my most creative in the morning.”  

The Point

As knowledge-workers, we are all going to have to come to the realization that more time, more effort, more energy doesn’t equal creativity or effectiveness.  It just equals more time and more effort. That's it.  If you are playing a game of who-works-hardest then keep going, I guess, but if you want to be creative and innovative, then maybe work as hard as you can while you're working and then stop and do something else.

I think there is a reason that athlete’s work really hard in times of peak performance and then rest their bodies.

There is a reason writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Stafford, and Victor Hugo would work for a while in the morning and then go for long walks in the afternoon.  

Both high performing athletes and creative writers alike see the value of both hard work and the regenerative process of the productivity reset.  There is only so much a knowledge-worker can do to be productive before they need to recharge their brain.

According to Margaret Moussa, Maria-Estella Varua, and Matthew Wright’s work on knowledge-workers, what has been left out of the discussion up until now are issues of self-efficacy and well-being.  

The question we need to ask ourselves as leader is:

Can we leaders continue to treat our knowledge-workers the same way we treated productivity-workers of ages gone by?

And…

Can we as knowledge-workers continue to try and cram more stuff into our day and expect quality outputs?

3 Step Rest Process

Here are three things that I try to do when I am in need of a productivity reset.

1. Read. There is nothing like reading to stimulate productivity. If I ever have writer's block, reading is one of the best ways I know to get the juices flowing again. I have found that there is nothing like poetry and fiction to really get my juices flowing again. In fact, I just finished a chapter of Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman.
   

2. Walk. I love to exercise but when I work out I am really focused on pushing my body, so I don’t get many creative thoughts going when my heart rate is above 140. But when I am just out for a walk, and the sun is shining, and I can sense the beauty all around me, my creative energy just seems to flow.
   

3. Phone a Friend. For me, there is nothing like community and conversation to spur creativity. I always feel better when I get off the phone with my coach, my coaching group, or a conversation with Kevin or Joanne. There is just something about talking to others that will spur on my creative process.

As leaders, when we think about ourselves or those who are in our care, perhaps we need to be thinking less about how productive we can be and more about how we are practicing self-care. It is elements like reading, taking a walk, and engaging in a community that are the real ways we gain wisdom. 

Could it be that as knowledge-workers we are really seeking things like wisdom, and as we do we actually become more productive as a by-product?

I had many more things to say about this topic, but I am feeling a bit confused and convoluted right now….

I think I will go for a walk.

3 Minute Read to Improve Your Leadership Resolution for 2018

Happy New Year! I know many of you are still on vacation so I promise to keep this one short and to the point. 

Many of us begin thinking today what we will resolve to do (or not do) in 2018.  

A resolution, in fact, is just this, "a firm decision to do or not do something."

Like you, In the past I have made many types of New Years Resolutions:

• Personal: Eat right, exercise more and lose 10 pounds.

• Professional: Increase sales by 20% by becoming more customer-centric.

• Family: Become a better listener when talking with my wife.

• Spiritual: Read through the Bible in a year.

All good stuff. I am sure many of you are making resolutions and talking with your friends and family about them even today.

I thought I might challenge you to add a category this year. In addition to your personal, professional, family, and spiritual resolutions to think about a resolution to improve your leadership.

Leadership

Here are 10 Ideas to help you start to think about what you could resolve to change in 2018 when it comes to your leadership. I pulled this list from some of our more popular blog posts this year and have included a link to some of them just in case you want to read more on a few of these subjects.

1. Reflect on Being a Great Leader and what is keeping you from being great. Who among us doesn’t want to be seen as a great leader? And yet so many of us have some barrier that we just don’t want to see or do anything about. (Do You Make These Leadership Mistakes)

2. Work on your values before your vision. Define what is important to you as you begin to sculpt your vision for yourself and your followers.

3. Spend less time working and more time thinking. This idea runs counter-culture to our “doing” mentality. Perhaps you need to work less and think more to enhance your ability to lead. (Solve This Riddle and Challenge Your Leadership Perspective.)

4. If you were a brand (like Kleenex or Toyota,) what would your value proposition be?

5. Who in your organization do you need to network with? (Who Else Wants to Develop as a Leader?)

6. What piece of FeedForward advice do you need to seek out? In our organizations, we are so good at feedback. We just love telling people what we observed them doing. Why not start a culture of FeedForward? Perhaps we could all get a little better at offering some solutions in addition to what we see in others that we don’t like. (What advice would you give this first time leader)

7. What cycle of negative thinking will you break this year?

8. How are you resting in the middle of your workday? Studies are showing how important rest is for leaders to maintain their effectiveness. How are you cycling your work to maximize your performance?

9. Take your emotional intelligence temperature. Are you able to choose how you react or are you “slave” to your knee-jerk reactions?

10. Whatever change you make, put a plan in place to sustain it.

I am looking forward to being with you on your leadership journey. If there are subjects you would like tackled on these pages just drop me a line. I am happy to do the research and then write about what interests you.

My prayer for you is that you have a productive and effective year as a leader.

Blessings to you and your families.

PS: If you know someone who might be interested in growing as a leader in 2018, why not forward them this blog and have them sign up? It's free and easy, and we guarantee they will get tons of value.

5 of My Top 100 Reasons to be Thankful this Christmas Day

Merry Christmas to you and your family!

I thought I would take today to share with you 5 of my top 100 reasons to be thankful this Christmas. 

First, I am thankful for my beautiful wife who I get to enjoy life with. 

I am thankful I get to work with so many of you in such amazing places. 

I am thankful for really cool and mysterious things in this world, such as this square with 16 numbers that allows more than 300 possible combinations of 4 numbers that always add up to 33, the age of Christ when He was crucified.

I am thankful for beaches and sunsets. 

I am so thankful for the joy I get to experience in life. 

Last, I am so thankful for you, my readers! Please CLICK HERE to download A Minimalist's Guide to a Personal Leadership Retreat as my free Christmas gift to you when you enter the promo code MERRYCHRISTMAS at checkout! 

Have a blessed Christmas, 

Dr. Scott Livingston

Solve this Riddle and Challenge Your Leadership Perspective

Alert! There is a free gift offer at the end of this post, but you have to read the entire post to get the free gift. Not really. You could go to the end and get the offer code, CLICK HERE and just get your free gift. But then you would miss a really cool riddle and some salient leadership stuff that might help you be more productive. 

Here is the riddle:

Three travelers were on a journey when they checked into a cut-rate hotel. The clerk at the desk told them there was only one room left and the price was $30 for the night.  Exhausted, the travelers took the room and each gave the clerk a $10 bill.  The next morning the hotel manager was reviewing the guest list and noticed that the night clerk had actually overcharged the travelers for the room. The published room rate was $25, and having just been to a leadership workshop on Building Character In Leaders, he asked the Bellhop to get five $1 bills out of the drawer and to refund the travelers the $5 difference. On the way to the travelers' room, the Bellhop realized that five is not easily divisible by three and not having been to the Building Character in Leaders workshop decided to give each of the travelers $1 and stick the remaining $2 in his pocket.

Now, you realize that $9 times three travelers is $27 plus the two dollars that the Bellhop put in his pocket equals $29.

Question: Where did the other dollar go?

Reflection is such an important part of leadership.

As organizational leaders, we find ourselves in the midst of some pretty busy times these days.  "Crazy busy” is actually what Dan called it in a workshop I led yesterday. The end of the year finds us trying to cram a lot of activity into not-so-much space. On the personal side, there are holiday parties, kids' school programs, last minute travel preparations, and gift purchase fill our minds. On the business side, there are year-end performance reviews to complete, development planning discussions to have, and planning meetings to hit the ground running in January.

 It just feels like there is not enough time to get everything in, let alone find space for personal reflection.

In fact, many of you might say, “Come on, man, there is no way I have time to rest and reflect!  I’ll do that down the road...”

And then you realize you won’t. 

Because January will be just as crazy as December and February just like the two months that preceded it.

So What Is A Leader to Do?

This is a question I get asked a lot in my executive coaching practice.  “I have so much that I need to do, I don’t have time to do anything else.” and then the question comes…”So, Scott what should I do about this?”  And you can see the trap we fall into.  We think that doing something is going to get us out of the crazy.  

Now I am not going to discount things like better planning, and prioritizing important over urgent work.  There are some productivity hacks that might help some folks.  But most of the leaders I work with are “hacked out” of productivity. Everything they are working on is important. So now what.

Here is my advice:  Work less and think more.

I recently ran across a two-year study out of Sweden that experimented with a 6 hour work day instead of a traditional 8 hour day for nurses at a care facility in Gothenburg. Here are some of the researchers' conclusions regarding the nurses who worked fewer hours:

• They were less tired

• less sick

• had more energy coming home

• increased time to do activities

• got an average of 7 hours of sleep a day versus less than 6 hours a day for nurses working traditional hours.

• even their blood pressure was lower than the average for all professional women in Sweeden.

So maybe you can’t get your supervisor to agree to a 6 hour work week. I get it. 

The question becomes, what can you do?

Try This Simple Step

The assumptions you are using to create your reality can’t all be valid if you can’t get everything done in the allotted time. You are telling yourself that all this craziness is normal and this is the cycle of thinking you need to break. 

But you don’t even have time to think about how to change. You are right! You don’t have the time!

You have to make the time! And I am going to give you a free gift that you can use when you make the time.

More on that in just a minute, but first the answer to the riddle: 

Answer to The Refunding The Travelers Riddle

Have you figured it out? 

If you follow the math as I originally laid it out there is a $1 that seems to be missing.

But that is because I gave you a faulty assumption.  

Each of the travelers indeed would get a $1 refund and the Bellhop put the $2 in his pocket. 

You do not add the $2 from the bellman, you subtract it from the total.  So 9 times $3 refunded reduces the price of the room to $27 dollars and when you subtract the $2 the bellman kept you get the $25 price of the room.

Faulty assumptions are at the root of many leadership issues.

What Faulty Assumptions Are You Making?

I wish I had some pixy dust or a magic wand to help you answer the above question. I don’t

But what I do have is a free gift that might be of value.

I have written The Minimalist Guide to a 4-Hour Personal Leadership Retreat and it is yours absolutely free if you CLICK HERE and enter this promo code below when you checkout:

MerryChristmas

It is my gift to you. While I don’t have the answer to what leadership assumptions you are making that are not serving you well right now, you do. You just have not MADE the time to think about what they are.

The Minimalist Guide was developed so that when you MAKE time for yourself to reflect on your personal leadership, you will have some structure to help you along the way.

If you decide to take the challenge and make some time for yourself and use the guide, drop me a note and let me know what you learned. I love hearing from you. I promise if you send me a note, I will read it and reply to it personally. 

A Golden Ticket for Learning From Critical Feedback

Last week I wrote about how it feels to receive critical feedback. This week I want to give you another example of how critical feedback can present itself and some more ideas on changing your response when this happens to you.

Blinding Glimpse

When my manager doesn’t see my performance the way I see it my natural reaction is to protect myself by desiring to understand WHY!

The feeling is that if we can understand the rationale of what the other person is thinking then we will somehow be better able to cope with what is going on.

My encouragement for you is going to be that when this happens to you, that your initial reaction change from “why” the person is saying this to “How could I do better?"

The goal, when someone is providing you critical feedback, is to not become defensive. If your knee-jerk reaction is “why” your defensive posture may be inhibiting you from learning. Focusing on you can improve and learn from the feedback can give you more of an open posture. In the moment, the “why” question can cause the other person to feel attacked.

 If our goal in organizations is to learn, then we have to stop feeling like we are being attacked and get much better at learning from each other.

Please allow me to elaborate:

One of the tools that I find most effective in both my coaching and training practices is to use a 360 feedback tool. In my executive coaching, I prefer to use  Leaderpath 360, which is a leadership-oriented interview feedback tool. When it comes to training leaders in classroom settings my preference is the EQI 2.0 360.  

Both of these feedback tools provide for different professional and personal relations to give feedback to the participant I am working with. Professional clients receive feedback from direct reports, peers, and their direct supervisor.

While each of these relationships provide some interesting perspective for those receiving the feedback, the supervising manager's rating is the most impactful when it is lower than any of the other relations' ratings. This often causes the participant to become the most defensive. 

I pulled an example from a sample EQI 2.0 360 report to illustrate my point. The Emotional Intelligence Competencies being measured are color-coded on the far left of the illustration. The Green icon “M” is the supervising managers feedback. The Blue icon “S” is the person’s self-reported feedback. (The Red “F” is family and the Brown “O” is other).  The numerical scale at the top goes from low of 50 (70 is first number shown) to a high of 150 (130 is the high number shown.) 

In each of these cases, you can see that the supervising manager's feedback is lower than the person’s self-reporting feedback. Not necessarily a message any of us likes to receive. 

You can imagine that if this were your EI 360 report, opening up to one of the first summary pages and seeing that you and your manager do not see eye to eye on most of the key leadership attributes. The first and natural reaction is "why?"

A perfectly natural, yet, oddly enough, not very helpful reaction.

Defensive Reactions Inhibit Learning

I had the opportunity to lead a training using this very instrument for a client several weeks ago and had a young leader come up to me at the lunch break. He was obviously trying to make sense of the data in front of him. Similar to the graphic above, his feedback showed that in every emotional intelligence competency, he, his peers, and his direct reports rated his emotional intelligence higher than his manager rated him.

The young leader was intently focused on trying to understand why this was so. 

His very natural, defensive reaction was to try and understand, to put story as to the reason why the manager saw him in this light.

“I just do not understand the reasons behind this feedback," was his opening comment to me.

“What is it that you do not understand?” I asked.

“Why would my manager rate me this low on all these competencies?” Tears started to well in his eyes.

As a coach, I knew at this point my job was to help this young leader see past the “why” of the situation. The important thing in that moment was not “why” the supervisor had done this, but what the young leader was going to focus on moving forward. 

Focusing on the wrong question was not going to help this young leader move forward. In that situation, in that moment, we were not going to be able to answer those most basic of “why” questions. The supervisor was not present, and even if he/she were present, the question could very well put the supervisor in a defensive position. 

If that were to happen we would then have a defensive supervisor and a defensive employee each focused on defending their position. Not a recipe for a healthy development conversation.

The Coache's Role

As someone in a leadership or coaching position, in that moment the goal must be to help the person let go of the "why" and focus on what to do next. For development to happen, we must use our coaching ability to help them see the change they need to make. This is our first step towards development.

The conversation when something like this:

Me: “I want to encourage you to let go of the question of 'why' and focus on what the report is telling you overall.” 

Participant: “But if I understand why my boss sees me this way, I can do something about it."

Me: “No, that is a rabbit trail, you think is logical, but in reality is a dead end.”

Participant:  Long blank stare followed by an even longer pause. “But why…?”  He just couldn’t help but get one more defensive salvo in before he let his guard down.

Me: “ Why isn’t important right now. Maybe someday it will become clear to you, but what is important now is to see the bigger picture the report is showing you. What are you going to do with this feedback? Who is going to help you move forward? These questions hold the object of your focus.”

As he exhaled I could see the shift in his demeanor from agitation to calm listening.  

Now The Development Conversation Can Start

This was hard for him, really hard.  Ultimately, what the young leader was experiencing was some form of put-down or rejection in the moment. None of us likes to be rejected or even experience the feeling of being rejected. This feeling of a cold shoulder toward our performance is disruptive, and, might I add, quite a valuable gift.

The bonus that this young leader received from the supervisor's feedback is more valuable than any nominal raise in pay he will ever receive. Now the young leader knows there is work to be done. Until this moment in time, he thought he was doing well across most of the leadership domains being measured.

Focusing on the next move or two can help the leader who is stuck on the wrong question to be able to move forward. And it is moving forward that best describes what development is all about.

Strategic Summary

Our first and natural reaction when receiving critical feedback is to defend ourselves. Even when we don’t think we are being defensive, many times we just can’t help ourselves.  It seems perfectly logical to want to understand why someone doesn’t see the world in the same way that we see it.

Move past your knee-jerk reaction of wanting to understand “why” behind the feedback and move quickly on to more productive ground of doing something about it. 

5 Steps Toward Sustainable Change

This is a very busy time of year for many of us.  In the U.S. we just celebrated Thanksgiving and that means, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are both in our sights or at least still visible in our rear-view mirror. The passing of these events means the ever-looming Christmas craziness is just around the corner.

And for many of you that can only mean one thing...

It is performance review time. That time when you will sit down with your supervisor and go over the goals you set for the year and measure your performance against those standards. Or, at least that is how it is supposed to work in theory.

For all of you over-achievers out there,  this can be an anxious time.  Most of us who work in organizations get up every morning and our self-created goal is to do the very best we can every day. Sometimes what we are supposed to do isn’t very clear. Sometimes what we are supposed to do changes, it seems, on an hourly basis. Most times what we know is important to do gets hijacked by the tyranny of someone else's agenda. And sometimes what we were hired to do is not what we end up doing at all.  

No matter what your individual circumstance, I am confident that most of you show up wanting to do the very best that you can with the time you have available. You feel like you have exceeded your goals and far surpassed expectations. Yet you will sit down with your supervisor at some point and the reality is that only so many of you can get that top performance ranking in any given year.  The rules of statistics say that most of you will get an average performance rating every year even though you feel like you deserve much more.

The dilemma you face is that you had what you considered to be an excellent year. Your boss agrees but ranks you as having an average year and then challenges you to “step up your game” to get that top ranking.

I think when most of us get this kind of feedback, it makes us a little defensive, so in the next couple of weeks I am going to share some tips on dealing with critical feedback. 

But for now, I want you to proactively be thinking about what it is that you need to change to get that top performance ranking next year.  Maybe you need to add a skill to your toolbox. Maybe you need to be more assertive with your peers or show a little more empathy with your direct reports. Whatever the case, for most of you the problem isn’t finding what it is you need to change, the question is how to sustain the change you want to make.

The issue of sustaining change is not a new concept. Kurt Lewen observed in the 1940s that making a change was often very short lived. It's like drinking a Monster energy drink. Sure, you are moving faster or have more focus, but so often, once the caffeine is out of your system, the energy level decreases back to its original level. Lewen noted that something more was needed than a shot-in-the-arm type of boost. Sure, changes can be made in the short-run, but how do you translate that change to long-term outcomes?

5 Steps Toward Sustainable Change

1. Create a long-term value proposition. The coaching client has to see relevant longterm value in making any change that has been identified. Focusing on a value proposition will often cause the client to wrestle with their own belief system. Without changing what the person believes to be true, old behavioral habits return insidiously. In my health example, I have to associate overeating or eating the wrong foods as being bad for me ten years from now. It is too easy to succumb to temptation if you are focused on getting your short-term needs met. For my client from last week, who was always interrupting, he had to believe that his behavior was rude and that his intention was not to be seen this way. His need to be respected had to triumph over his need to be heard.

2. Experiment with new behaviors to find a fit. So often I hear coaches talk about practicing new behaviors before they even know if the new behavior will work or not. I like for my clients to experiment with several options to see what will work for them. The fear I have is if this step is skipped then we could end up practicing the wrong behavior and have to go through the process of unlearning and relearning. For me, I had to experiment with reducing the size of my protein choice at dinner, giving up a snack before bed, working out an extra day a week and completely eliminating fried foods. I played with all of these and finally found that what I wanted to practice was reducing my protein size at dinner. I went from eating an entire chicken breast to only eating a portion size equal to the size of my fist.

3. Practice the new behavior in a number of contexts. Then, I practiced this new behavior. When my wife and I grill, we split a chicken breast. When I go out to eat I ask for smaller sizes. When I travel I am conscious not to just go ahead and order the largest meal on the menu because I forgot to have an afternoon snack. To gain sustainability it is important to practice the new behavior across contexts. My client had to practice not interrupting his boss, his peers, his direct reports. He had to practice not interrupting during presentations, and one-on-ones, and on conference calls.

4. Identify relational feedback loops. No change can happen in isolation. We all need constant feedback. We need safe places to see if people notice the changes we are making. This is where it can help to share your development goals across a broad number of relationships. This constant feedback loop is critical to making that new behavior a sticky habit. My client would actually say to his direct reports during one-on-one meetings, "My goal is not to interrupt you and finish your sentences during our meeting today. If I do this would you please just get up and put a tick mark on my whiteboard.” Feedback is a gift, all the way through the development process.

5. Celebrate the noted change. Let the dopamine in your brain flow. You have worked long and hard to gain this change. Likely somewhere between 2 and 3 months at a minimum. Why not have a party? Why not let the good feeling of accomplishment and a job well-done flow through to those who have been with you on your development journey.

I would be really interested in knowing if you have other coaching sustainability tips. Why not leave a comment or share an experience below. I would love to hear from you!

Making Change is Hard, This is Harder

 So most of you who read this blog with any regularity know that I pay fairly close attention to my health.

I try to make healthy food choices. 

I actually enjoy working out.

I value my faith in God and personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

I love my important relationships: My wife, my family, my team, my customers, my close friends.

At my most recent appointment with my physician, the incredible Dr. James Scelfo, he asked me a number of follow up questions from my previous visit. Here is the one that was the most interesting to me:

“Scott, you have lost about 5 pounds. We had a goal of 10, and 5 is really nice progress. Can you sustain it?”

Provocative Question

Did you catch it?  The good doctor inferred a change in behavior based on the outcome: The loss of 5 pounds. He also questioned if the shift in behavior and habits was one that I could continue. I thought his question was a really good one. He wasn't curious how it did it, but rather if I could sustain it.

Not improve upon it.

Not make it better.

Not lose 2 more.

Sustain it.

Sustain: What an interesting word! Not one that gets too much focus in the world of leadership development. We are always looking to say, "Can you improve? Can you give me a little more? Can you do just a little better? There might be one more promotion out there, if you do this one more thing!"

Dr. Scelfo didn't ask that. He is a really smart dude. He knows that before I can commit to giving him one or two more pounds, the real question is can I keep it up. Can I stay where I am long enough to learn new habits? Learning new habits becomes one of the key elements to sustainability.

What does it mean to sustain?

I was so intrigued by this question. I had to go back to my car and look up the word in the dictionary. I thought I knew what sustain meant and one of the definitions provided was pretty close to my thinking: “To keep going an action or process."

Although, that's not what caught my eye. What was fascinating to me was one of the other definitions given: “To undergo, experience, or suffer (injury, loss, etc;) endure without giving way or yielding.”

To sustain means to recognize that you have undergone a process, had an experience and even suffered and you are enduring without going back to your old ways.

Celebrate Observable Change In Behavior

Personally, I don’t know if there is anything more rewarding than when I observe a client making a change.

I recall a client several years back who, unbeknownst to himself, would interrupt people and finish their sentences for them.  I remember like it was yesterday sitting with him, being in the conversation, and having him cut me off mid-sentence. As he would do it, I would stop him in his tracks and say, "There, you did it again."

In our coaching, he really worked hard on increasing his impulse control and at the same time decreasing his need to feel heard. 

Not easy work. In fact, it's really hard work.

When I did a mini-360 check-in with some of his key relationships they were surprised at the dramatic change he had made. The question the president of the affiliate had for me was, “So coach, do you think he can sustain the change?”

In our coaching, let’s not ever fool ourselves into thinking that just because we are seeing some behavior change, that we are seeing a new habit.

How Coaches Can Help Finish Change

There are times where a coaching relationship just ends too soon or for internal coaches, the behavior change happens and then we move on to whatever is next. All of this in the context of the person has “moved” to a new change behavior.  The question we all have to ask ourselves is have they made the change? Have they obtained sustainability?

Think about a change that you want to make or one you've tried to make. What would your life look like if you made that change? Are the habits for that change sustainable, something you can live with long term?

Next week, I'll share 5 steps you can take to make sustainable changes or coach someone through it. In the meantime, leave us a comment about what sustainable success you've had. How did you do it and what advice would you give others?

Have You Heard the One About the Turtle on the Fence Post....?

I was on the phone the other day with an old friend who is retiring from his job of 30 years, but who is too young to just fish and play golf. We were talking about what it is like to be in business for yourself. As the conversation went along, he said to me “Do you know the story of the turtle on the fence post?"

So, this story has been around for a long time, and yet, as I was thinking about the relationship to coaching and leadership it really struck me as impactful. As both coaches and leaders, we get mental pictures of how we are seeing the world. One very important task we all have is to be able to ask the right questions in order to get our clients and teams to broaden their perspectives when obstacles arise. Being open to perspective is the key to understanding and a sure sign you are at a minimum being empathic.

The story goes that a father and his daughter were driving along the road in West Texas. The road was long and straight and there was nothing but concrete, blue sky, and fence posts to look at. It seems like they had driven for hours to the point where all they saw was fence post….fence post…..fence post. If you have driven in West Texas you know what this can be like.  

Fencepost…fencepost….fencepost...

Fencepost…fencepost…fencepost with a turtle on it….fencepost…

Then the young girl turned to her dad and said, “Did you see that turtle on the fencepost? I wonder how it got there!”

The father, seeing the teachable moment, pulls the truck off the side of the road, turns to his daughter and says, “The question isn’t how the turtle got there. The question really is WHO put the turtle there.”

Leadership Application

As leaders, so many times we see it as our job to have all the answers. We can have this insatiable desire for information or for knowledge. We fall into the trap of thinking that the person with the information is the one who has the power in a relationship.  

While it is foolish to discount the importance of having information, I have come to believe that it is the person who has the right question that really sets the tone and the agenda in the organization.

In the little story about the turtle on the fence post, the daughter had the information. She was able to observe what was going on in her world. She even asked a question which is really cool. She did not assume she could explain the quite unnatural phenomena.

In front of her was a turtle on a fence post...

• unnatural

• interesting

• alluring

• intriguing

All of these natural responses to seeing a turtle on a fence post.  

The little girl should even get credit for doing more than just saying, “Look there is a turtle on a fence post,” and then turning back to her phone to continue to mindlessly scroll through her Facebook page.

She asks a question of her dad, in fact, a good question, a reasonable question.  “How did the turtle get there?”

But the father knew that in this case, the answer to the question lay deeper in “who put the turtle on the fence post.”

4 Strategies for Leaders to think more critically

As I was thinking about the story of the turtle on the fence post and how it might apply to leadership, four main things came to mind.

1. Be careful not to rush to judgement

This is a real trap for the experienced leader. A young person brings a problem into the office and rather than ask for understanding or context the wise sage says, "I have seen this 100 times in all my years…."

While having experience is important, as leaders we must be cautious in playing the experience card. Experience can give the impression of certainty. Certainty brings with it an idea of mitigation of risk. "I have seen this before and this is what will work."

The problem with certainty is that there is no room for creativity or curiosity. There is no room for learning for that young leader. There is no place for them to develop their own set of experiences so they have things to judge against in the future.

1. Be open and curious in your questioning.

The main point here is for the leader to work hard to be unbiased and to be really genuine. We have to have our curiosity meter set on maximum as well as our genuine interest be on helping the other person.  

1. Co-create Reality

Leaders who are skilled at critical thinking have an ability to co-create reality with those they are working with. Develop the ability to come up with questions for which you have no answer.  These types of questions will help to create the reality that you and your followers are experiencing.

As you think about the turtle on the fence post, remember that the father knew that there is no way the turtle could get there on its own. There was some assistance that was needed.  “How” the turtle got there was not going to get the conversation much further.  “I don’t know” is about the only answer you could expect to get. In this case, the person who might come into your office might be left with well, let me see if I can go find some reasons for turtles to be on a fence post and I will get back to you.

But the father circumvented this by changing the question.  By changing the question, the little girl now can co-create the reality with her father and a teachable moment comes about.  As the question changes from “how” to “who," the leader is able to set the agenda and the follower is able to enter into this reality as a co-creator of what can be versus just describing what is.

1. think WHO as much as you think HOW

Almost once a week I find myself in a conversation with someone looking for a new job.  

Their questions often go something like:

“I am thinking about looking for this new job and was wondering if you could take a look at my resume.”

My standard reply has become, “Who do you know there? Who do you know in the industry?” 

Call me old school, but it is the person hiring who gets me the job, not my resume. How you got to the interview and all of your great experience IS NOT getting you the job that you desire. I guarantee it is the hiring manager who is going to bring you on the team.

What about you guys? Any tips you might have that improves your critical thinking?

Focus Here to Reduce Your Stress Today

The past two days were really busy for me, but they were not necessarily stressful. 

Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone how they are doing, a common response is “really busy..." and these words are usually followed by a heavy sigh, an eye-roll, and a shrug of the shoulders.

Being busy carries some sort of identity for us. We can’t just “be” who we are, we have to “be” something in order to have identity.

We've decided that to be busy is to be stressed. And if busyness is stressful then this fills our identity, bringing some sort of value to who we are. I am amazed at the thinking on this. Just because we are busy and stressed we are somehow more valuable and have more self-worth.

A lie straight from the pit of Hell!!!

I completely disagree with these lies we tell ourselves:

Lie #1: I am busy so I have to be stressed.

Lie #2: I am busy and stressed so I must be bringing more value to my work.

Lie #3: I am busy and stressed and bringing more value so even though I am exhausted I have a higher feeling of self-worth.

When are we going to stop equating busyness and stress with self-worth?

My Point

I think you can be really busy and not be stressed out.

My good friend Dr. Tim Gardner is famous for saying, “What people know about stress is killing them.” Think about that for a minute. In the world of stress and stress management, there is not much new information that has come around over the last 20 years or so. You know everything you need to know about stress and how to manage it and yet you choose it anyway.

I am not talking about temporary stress here like the tension felt in Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the World Champion Chicago Cubs and the Washington Nationals. A four and a half hour, nine-inning baseball game that had more ups and downs and tense moments for both teams.  While it that was a really tense 4 and a half hours, that is not the kind of temporary tension I am writing about.

What Dr. Tim means is that most of us know we are going to be busy, and this busyness has the potential to be stressful, and if you let it be stressful it can have a detrimental effect on your overall health and well being.

The question I have for you today is: If you are busy can you choose not to be stressed?

Main Idea

Many of you know that for the past 20 years or so I have been involved in the emotional intelligence movement. Now when you teach something like emotional intelligence, I think folks watch to see if you are a theorist or a practitioner. A theorist knows what the main ideas are and can pass any exam they might take on a subject. A practitioner is someone who understands the theory and works hard to put it into practice.

One of the things we are really excited about in our organization is the certification work we are doing with the EQi 2.0.  The actual certification class is a 2-day virtual training that is filled with a lot of practical strategies for implementing the EQi 2.0 assessment.  It is exciting for us to work with professionals dedicated to the growth and development of others. We love the work and hearing the great things the participants have to say in training.

One of the competencies we work on is stress management. This idea of managing stress really has two components:

1. What to do in a particularly stressful moment?

2. How do you manage stress so you lessen its overall effect?

It is this second strategy I want you to think about today.

Management is by definition a planning and organizing function. So if you know you are going to be busy, then how can you plan and organize your life so that the busyness is not stressful?

We often talk about how to deal with stress after the fact, but what if we were more observant of stress before it began? Here are 3 keywords to a proactive stress plan. These words may sound familiar, but pay attention to their definitions. Putting a word to feelings you might not associate with stress can make all the difference when it comes to preparing to overcome our obstacles by helping us create clearer goals. While you're reading, see if any of these definitions relate to your relationship with stress in ways you may not have been able to put words to before. 

   3 Strategies To Change Your L      

FLEXIBILITY: The ability to adapt to change effectively. Any change in life is going to bring emotion. How flexible are you with these feelings? This is a different question than "are you able to take the needed action in a crisis?" Instead, flexibility asks if you are able to flex and choose a different emotional response when you are faced with obstacles. If not, ask yourself: can you put strategies in place to do so? Do you have the flexibility to overpower your emotion and choose a different one, or are you subject to the emotion?

Tolerance: How much can I hold until I break? Tolerance equates with strength. Think of metal: There is a certain amount of weight it holds until it will break. You are the same. There is a level of stress you can hold until you will break. Tolerance measures where that level is for you. This sounds abstract, but it is not. Make a list of all the stressors you are juggling. Can you cross one off or delegate some of that stress? 

Optimism: To be optimistic is not to be a shiny happy person who refuses to see harsh realities, but to be resilient. Optimistic people know that it is not a matter of if something will go wrong, but when and are prepared to respond with resilience. It is a constructive response to setbacks. This is where self-talk comes into play: How you talk to yourself when things don't go your way? Are you able to say "This setback happened, but I am still myself apart from this situation and will move on," or do you equate the even with your personality, saying things like, "This is who I am, this sort of thing always happens to me." To be optimistic is to perceive reality properly by not using words like "always" and "never," and to instead to see the situation as what it was, and be ready to separate it from your future self. 

Are you going through the motions without examining your stress management? Use these 3 words this week to help you evaluate yourself in these areas, and open up a dialogue with yourself. Ask yourself difficult questions about how much you can really take on, what you are allowing to define your worth, and whether or not you are a slave to your emotions. 

5 Performance Killers We All Face and How to Deal with Them

My wife and I were faced with a tough decision a few months ago. 

Now, you have to understand that I have the cutest granddaughter in the world. I know some of you out there have grandkids too, but let me tell you something right now…not one of them is cuter than mine.

The problem is that we live in Florida and she lives in Ohio. I think you see the issue now. Grandma and I just don’t get enough quality time with that cute little bundle of joy. When she says, “Come on, Grandpa, let's go play with toys…” my heart melts like butter in a skillet.

So, we were talking with some friends about our problem and they said, “Why don’t you just move to Columbus?”

Fair question. Here is my response:

1. Don’t want to move

2. Hate winter

Then our friend said, "Why don’t you live in Ohio in the summer and winter in Florida."

My knee-jerk reaction was, “I am not old enough to be a snowbird." However, the more I thought about it and the more we talked the more it sounded kind of cool.

So, we decided to buy a small, inexpensive little condo in Ohio. We talked to my financial team who convinced me that because interest rates are low I should borrow some of the money for the condo. This sent me into a bit of an emotional “fight or flight” moment. I really don’t like borrowing money. It is the invasiveness of the process that just turns my stomach: I actually got an email from one of the lenders asking to validate my accounts to prove I was not a money launderer or terrorist. 

Intellectually, I get it. This is the world we live in, but now I have to prove I am  not one of these things for someone to do business with me. When I questioned the banker he blamed it on the Feds.

And some of you still think having the government in healthcare is a good idea. Really?

That is when I realized I have some performance anxieties.  Nothing I need to see a psychiatrist about (at least I don’t think it is that bad,) but there are times when my performance is not as good as it could be. 

When my financial advisor said that I should get a small mortgage on the condo, my flight or flight kicked in, so I did what any good coach would tell their client to do, and sat down to journal my feelings. I also did some research on this idea of emotional distraction and performance.

My Journaling Results

So the first thing I did was to sit down and document what I was feeling. This was not difficult and I came up with this list in under five minutes. It was amazing to me when I sat down and just wrote it out what happened.

1. Not smart enough. I had this overwhelming feeling like the bankers and loan people would ask me questions that I wouldn’t know the answer to.

2. Weakness. What if this was a bad decision and someone criticized it along the way?

3. Rejection. What if they said I didn’t qualify?

4. Asking for help. The more people who know I am taking out this loan, the more people who could see me as incompetent. After all, Kim and I have really avoided debt for most of our marriage.

5. Power gradient. I felt like I had to do everything I could to please the lender so they would approve me.

The Research

In 2002 Kaiser and Kaplan did some research on distortions in performance caused by what they called “sensitivities." These sensitivities are things that have happened to us in our past that now affect how we perform in the present. What they describe in their research that I didn’t realize in my journaling is that there is an underperforming and an overperforming reaction. 

So for example, if a leader gets into a situation where they feel “Intellectually Inadequate” or what I termed “not smart enough," if they respond by “doing too little” they might not contribute in meetings, but if they “overdo it” they might work extreme hours to over compensate for the inadequate feeling.

How About You?

Think about a decision you are going to make soon or a place where your performance is not where you want it. Pay attention to how you are feeling. Do you feel:

1. Not smart enough

2. Weak

3. Rejected

4. Dependent

5. Powerless

If you have these feelings, are you overcompensating or under compensating? Some of these feelings might run very deep and the cause can stem back to your childhood. 

Sitting down with a journal and analyzing your feeling and understanding them might help you be able to overcome any compensation you are experiencing and put a plan in place to overcome the anxiety.

By the way, I was able to answer all the lenders' questions. It was not that difficult of a process and we should close on our condo this week. I can tell you one thing, being close to my grand baby is going to make any performance anxiety I was dealing with totally worth it.