5 Strategic Inflection Points for Leadership Development

“A strategic inflection point for a business is when its fundamentals are about to change. They are the result of an event which changes the way we think or act.”

- Andy Grove, ex-Chairman, Intel

An awful lot has been written over the years about the growth curve for business. We tend to marvel at the meteoric rise of organizations like Amazon while at the same time wondering what happened to great powerhouses like Sears.  

It is so fascinating that for years before Amazon came on the scene we could order things from Sears and have them mailed to our house. While I understand that Amazon has created a digitized experience, I can’t help but wonder how the executives at Sears did not see this trend and buy Amazon in its first year.

It really is amazing that some of the real organizational giants in our world have struggled, even becoming eclipsed, by small, innovative organizations that captured the hearts and minds of us all. 

I was reading an article recently that tried to give some rationale as to how and why something like this could occur. I mean, who would have ever thought that the powerful General Electric (GE) would be removed from the Dow 30?

But in June of 2018, this very thing happened when Walgreens was added. GE was taken off because it no longer reflected the market, which was going up while GE was going down.

In fairness, GE is still a viable organization with lots of dedicated employees, yet there is no denying it is not doing as well as it had in the past. The reality is they never recovered from the 2009 crash. It took a bailout from Warren Buffet and the government to keep them solvent and they haven’t recovered overall since that downturn. 

Application for Leaders

As I was reflecting I began to wonder… if this could happen to GE, could it also happen to the leaders I interact with and coach?

And the truth is, it could! 

Here are 5 things to consider as you innovate and develop:

1. Find one way to innovate within your current role.
   
   When most of us think about innovation we begin to feel overwhelmed and find it hard to conceptualize. Some consultants tell us to “think outside the box” if you want to innovate. However, Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg recommend just the opposite. They claim in their book, Inside the Box, that more and quicker innovation happens when you think inside the box. Rather than having to create a whole new job for yourself that no one understands, why not just put a couple of Boyd and Goldenberg’s strategies together and innovate your current role?

   1. Option 1: Stop doing one thing in your role that that was likely essential at some point but no longer is. Perhaps you work on a budget every month that no one looks at or makes comment on. What if that task just went away? Would anyone miss it?

   2. Option 2: Unify tasks. Maybe there are meetings you are having with 3 different people that you could combine into one meeting. Or maybe you are traveling to meetings in person and you could be doing it over video conference.

2. What one piece of critical feedback are you lacking?
   
   In a recent experiment people were asked to skip a meal and then entered a room where chocolate chip cookies had been baking. Half of the people were asked to eat 2 or 3 of the delicious cookies and the other half of the folks were asked to refrain from eating cookies and eat 2 or 3 radishes instead. Later all participants where asked to solve some fairly complex geometry problems. Those asked to refrain from eating cookies gave up twice as fast on the geometry problems as their counterparts. The researchers concluded that attention and effort goes into resisting temptation and leaves less energy and attention for other tasks. Douglas Stone and Shelia Heen, in their book Thanks for the Feedback, say this has important implications for our efforts to act on feedback we get and to change behavior. Feedback can be “accurate, timely, perceptive, and beautifully conveyed” (p. 258), but if it involves too many ideas to keep track of or too many decisions or changes, it is too much and nothing will happen. Instead of seeking out complicated feedback and writing complicated development plans, simply get feedback on the one thing you could do better and innovate around that.

3. Read the Organizational Signposts
   
   What are the trends in your organization that are destined to become imminent inflection points? Are you noticing that more emphasis is being put on relating to the customer rather than driving sales? If so, what changes do you need to make to become an innovator in this new behavior? Maybe you were the top performer in whatever you did 3 years ago, but it might not be relevant today unless you continue to innovate and grow.

4. Play Your Strength Card
   
   A lot has been said about this one over the past few years regarding how important it is to be yourself and focus on your gifts and talents. I agree with most of this, but what often gets left out of the equation is how to use these strengths to do the little things really well, better than everyone else, without drawing attention to yourself. I harken back to the great John Wooden, basketball coach for UCLA, who said, “High performance and production are achieved only through the identification and perfection of small but relevant details, little things done well.” How are you using your strengths to do the little things really well?

5. Take a 3 year view on the future.
   
   We all get caught up in the day to day and the quarter to quarter, but I wonder what would happen if we set our pride aside and really asked ourself what might be different in the next three years that could make our career obsolete. What about 5 years or 10 years down the road? At some point, someone is going to come along and do your job better, faster, or cheaper than you are.  I think what my wife is doing right now is a great example. She is an online teacher for VIP Kids, a company that gives english lessons to children in China. Sitting in our home in Orlando Florida at 6:30am she is doing half hour lessons for children in Bejing who have just finished dinner at 6:30pm. Teachers, if you don’t think that your students couldn’t be sitting at home getting the same lesson, I ask you…why not?  All of us need to be ready to upgrade our skills to prepare for whatever revolution is coming our way.

I can remember reading a book by Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, on the topic of management and leadership back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Organizations were changing how they evaluated performance based upon what Jack was doing at GE. After all, between 1981 and 2001 during Welch’s tenure the company gained 4,000% in value. Then 2009 hit and today GE has lost more value since 2016 than it is worth today, only about $88B from an all-time high of around $500B.

If it can happen to GE, Sears, and other icons, it can happen to you, no matter what kind of performer you are currently in your organization.

Start innovating and developing your own career today.

The Cost of Paying Attention

Recently a client of mine received feedback from his organization that he needed to become more self-aware of the impact of his behavior on others.

When I probed for what behavior seemed out of line, he told me that he had been rewarded his entire career for being a critical thinker and deliberate in decision-making. The organization needed to undergo changes to be more responsive in the marketplace and his caution was now being viewed as inflexibility. The feedback he was receiving from the organization was that he needed to be more self-aware of his inability to see things in other ways. He told me, “I need to pay attention to when I am being overly cautious and evaluate if I really am being inflexible or if my caution is warranted."

Paying attention. An interesting phrase…

Paying attention, as it relates to being self-aware, implies that there is a cost involved. When you sharpen your focus on something, you will inherently need to give something up in exchange.  In the example above, if my client is to be self-aware and pay attention to a behavior to elicit change, he will have to give up something in exchange for the attention he is going to give the new behavior.

Here is a simple example, if I go to the grocery store to pick up a banana, a transaction takes place. I give the clerk something of value to me, in this case, money, before receiving the product I desire more than the money I possess, the banana. Pretty simple.

When leaders are told they need to be self-aware of their actions or behaviors, it seems to get a bit more complicated than buying a banana. The process of becoming a self-aware leader requires that we give something up in order to draw attention to what we desire to change or better understand. This change in behavior must have more value to us than what we need to give up in order to obtain it.

When purchasing a banana, I know what I need to give up to own the fruit. In the same way, if I need to pay attention in order to become more self-aware of what is seen as inflexibility. For example, what must I give up in order to obtain this behavior change? To pay attention to this kind of behavior change will require humility to even get the process started. You have to recognize that you desire the banana more than you desire money and be willing to give up one in exchange for the other.

What does it take for you to humble yourself as a leader?

In this context, to be humble is really about having a clear perspective of your place in the context of your situation.  My client had to get to a point where he could be objective when situations arose. It is quite probable that because he had been rewarded (or at least had the feeling of such reward) in the past for his display of caution, that he installed it as a permanent successful behavior. After all, who does not like a positive feeling?

His first step in becoming self-aware had already occurred. He recognized the spectrum of behavior he was trying to distinguish. He had described the poles as being deliberate on one end and inflexible on the other. He gave up the freedom to just behave as he had been rewarded. He had to pay, in this case, his normal feeling of being cautious to precipitate a desired change or even recognize the spectrum that he was asked to change along.

Now he must understand the strength of his deliberateness and the weakness of his inflexibility.

Let me illustrate:

To stay in shape, I like to jog. I started having some knee pain. Once a week I work out with a personal trainer for 30 minutes, so I was telling him about the pain I was having in my knee. One of his thoughts was that I had some muscle imbalance, meaning one of the muscles in my leg had become stronger than another. The tension, caused by one muscle being stronger than another, caused a pulling at the joint and, therefore, the pain.

According to my trainer, this weakness causes an imbalance and puts stress on other muscles to become stronger and overcompensate for the weakness.  According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine there are many reasons that one muscle might be stronger than another, such as past trauma, repetitive movements, lack of core strength, poor training technique, emotional duress, and poor posture. He said, “Scott, you have to pay attention to strengthening all your muscle groups so that you don’t have knee pain."

There it was again, pay attention. What was I going to have to give up in order to relieve the pain? The same is true for my client, and for you.

What do you need to give up when you are working with those who follow your leadership so that you “pay attention” to them? If you are trying to listen better to what your followers are telling you, what is the cost to you? What do you need to give up to become a better listener? Have you identified the cost that may be involved for the change to occur?

Feel free to comment on this question. I would love to know what you are thinking.

Are You Using These 2 Factors To Align Organizational Culture?

Last week’s blog post on the 7 Step Organization Culture Checklist created a lot of stir in our faithful readers. If you happened to miss it, you can click here to give it a read before you finish this post.

I received several emails from folks who had some very interesting stories about how the organization they work in has a clear mission and vision, but then there is a seemingly huge gap in how leaders behave. This misalignment puts followers in a quandary. 

They say things like, “We are supposed to be delegating more and taking bureaucracy and senseless meetings out of our work flow. One expectation is that we are to have fewer group meetings. ‘You don’t need to collaborate on everything' is the mantra. Yet what is occurring is that the number of individual meetings I now have with people affected by my work has tripled. We still need to talk with everyone affected by our work, but now instead of getting a group together to do it once, we have three separate meetings with individuals. Then, if the last person I talk with doesn’t agree, I now have six meetings instead of one.”

This is an example of how the guiding principles, those objective structures that guide behavior, can be misaligned when culture is shifting.

Regarding the above example, the previous expectation was collaboration, so the behavior was to get everyone together and decide. The culture shift is toward speed and innovation, resulting in fewer meetings. However, enough of the old culture is still present that people continue feeling the need to collaborate, and change becomes hard. Lack of clarity and surprise are the worst things in a collaborative culture. What an innovative culture needs is speed, so not everyone can know everything.  

2 Factors to Align Organizational Culture

It is not that people do not want to embrace and change to a new way of doing things. More often than not, they really do. But, as creatures of habit, we all know how hard this is.

If you are a leader or have been with an organization for any significant period of time, you have been successful and rewarded for doing things the old way. Your brain, at a neurochemical level, has fallen in love with all the positive endorphins you received doing things the old way.

Enter change.

At the highest level it will start with a new vision and mission for the organization. My experience is that most people get the high level mantra’s, even if only intellectually. “We are customer centric,” “We bring innovation to our marketplace,” “A world without Alzheimers Disease.”

Captivating, aren’t they? Who doesn’t want a world without disease? What a great mission to be on and vision to set. 

Frankly, thats the easy part.

The hard part is understanding how you make this a reality at the behavioral level for everyone in the organization. This is where things like having fewer meetings comes in. While it is a good idea, it does not honor the old culture, nor does it really address the behavior being asked for by the new culture.

Here are two strategies for you to consider as you drive organizational change:

1. Incorporate “I will” statements.  
   
   This blog generally hits people’s inbox on Monday mornings at 6am. I am usually in the office between 8 and 9 to start my day. Last week on Monday, my phone rang at 11:15am. It was an old friend who I had worked with many years ago. He was fired up about the culture post and couldn’t wait to share with me his best tip for assessing and supporting culture change. The idea is simple, but the impact is profound. He relayed to me that in his role he had observed many different shifts in culture over the years. The best strategy he found was to ask people to articulate what they see themselves doing as a result of the change.  He called them “I will” statements. For example, a midlevel manger would say to followers, “I will support you if you get negative backlash for moving forward without checking with all the people you used to check with.”  These “I will” statements are powerful indicators to ensure that everyone in the organization aligns with the new behaviors.  Leaders have to get really good at listening to make sure the I will fits the behavior that supports the new culture. Thanks, Gerry, for the tip!

2. Believe in the person you are coaching.  
   
   Leaders have to realize that most changes we ask people to make take some degree of time to implement. It is not easy to go from being collaborative one day to speedy and innovative the next. A recent article in the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research really brought home the criticality around the idea of the impact of positive communication practices in coaching. Psychologists call it self-efficacy. The idea is that a person’s beliefs shape how they behave. It doesn’t matter if they are optimistic or pessimistic. High belief in self translates to greater confidence and enabling a person to completely devote themselves to the change. Some researchers believe that high belief in self is the golden ticket to performance. The higher the self-confidence in a given skill, the more effective the person will be.  I happen to think there are other factors that balance self-confidence, such as empathy, but for the most part if a person doesn’t believe they can change, then they likely will not.  Enter coaching, which means having frequent interactions with the person who is in a change process and supporting and believing in them all along. This doesn’t mean they won’t stumble or make mistakes, but it does let them know that as their coach you have their back and that you support them. Who doesn’t want that?

If you have other ideas on this, I would love to hear from you. Send me an email, or better yet, give me a cal - I would love to chat.

7 Step Organization Culture Checklist

I have been thinking a lot about organization culture this week because a client I have worked with for a number of years has been given the opportunity to build an organization from the ground up.  When she asked for my help with this project I was simultaneously excited and terrified.  

I was excited because I have a lot of education and experience in working on organization culture. When I was first named a manager 25 years ago I learned what it was like to be inserted into an existing culture. As a consultant, I have had several projects where I helped leaders better identify cultures they have created, then worked with them to make changes in those cultures.

On the other hand, I have never built an organization of any size from the ground up, and being presented with the opportunity to help do so was terrifying.

At this point I had a choice to make.  

I could see myself as an expert and rely on my experience. Experts have very narrow mindsets. They rely heavily on their knowledge and experience to inform the decisions they are making.

OR

I could take on the mindset of a beginner.  Those who have the mindset of a newbie know nothing, literally nothing, about the topic.

I decided to forget what I know about culture and take on a beginner’s mindset.  To do this I thought it might help for me to experience what it is like to be new at something I know nothing about. 

Playing a Guitar

I have to admit to you all that I literally know nothing about music unless it is how to turn on my TV and watch The Voice on NBC.  Seriously, that’s it.

I thought this fit the definition pretty well for me of having a beginner’s mindset, so I did what most of us do these days when we know nothing - I went to YouTube and searched for “guitar lesson 1.”

The expert I clicked on took for granted way too much for a person who knows nothing! He started talking about using three fingers to make a D note and to not get your fingers directly on the fret and said you count the number of fret’s from the nut.

This is exactly what I wanted! I wanted to experience what it was like to have a beginner’s mindset and experience an expert’s teaching from a level that is too high. My goal was to experience what it felt like to know nothing, struggling to learn something new when you don’t comprehend.

Being a beginner is really humbling. It takes patience, persistence, and a real thirst to learn what it is you are trying to better understand.

Building a Culture

I am hopeful that my approach to learning how to build a culture goes a bit more smoothly than what I am experiencing with the guitar. 

I also realize that many of you are not building a culture from nothing; so I wanted to reframe my search as a checklist you can use to assess how the culture of your team is growing.

As always, I started my quest in culture building in the academic literature. I found a lot of information on organization culture, but surprisingly little on building culture from the ground up. What I did find were ideas on what needs to be incorporated into organizational culture.  

Here are seven of the items that stood out and seemed to flow together for me:

1. Mission: Should describe what you are doing and who your team is designed to serve.

2. Vision: Articulates succinctly your future destination.

3. Purpose: The unselfish reason for being; who you are impacting and how lives are being changed by what you do.

4. Values: The fundamental subjective beliefs that guide behavior through emotional investment giving guidance to right and wrong, good and bad, how to interact with constituents and engage with customers.

5. Guiding Principles: Objective, prescriptive truths around expectations that provide a sense of direction for all involved.

6. Projected Story in 3 segments:

   1. Adventure-Three years from now what do we want to be said about us?

   2. Legend-Seven years from now what to we want emulated by those copying our success?

   3. Epitaph-Fifteen years from now what do we want to be remembered for?

7. Behavior: Observable actions that can be articulated accurately by people

   1. Who are new to the organization

   2. Who just left the organization

   3. Who are outside the organization
      
      These behaviors should ultimately match the first 6 descriptors if we are managing our culture accurately.  

I would love to know what you all think on this topic. Drop me a line and give me some feedback on what you think about this checklist. If any of you use this as a checklist with your teams, I am interested in what you found. Until next week….

An Open Letter on the Leadership Skill of Coaching

“Every now and then, someone asks me for advice on how to become a writer. If I am on my game, I don’t offer advice. Instead, I ask questions in hopes of evoking my conversation partner’s inner teacher, the most reliable source of guidance anyone has.” 
Parker Palmer, “On the brink of everything; Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old”

I really love this quote by Parker Palmer because his world of being a writer is my exact experience of being an executive coach.

Last week’s blog discussed the topic of coaching and helping others see what behaviors they need to change by thinking about what things they need to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing.

I received the following note from one of my readers who is a nursing leader at a rather large hospital system in the midwest:

Scott,
Great timely article!!  You know how each year God seems to pound you with a “word” for growing? Well I would not say this is my spiritual word, (although it could be lol), but I  do believe this is my professional one.  COACHING….  Coaching women is so much more comfortable for me spiritually than coaching my young employees professionally.   

Because they have all have been doing their jobs much longer than I have their knowledge base about standards, compliance, and overall  ambulatory (verses hospital) experience far outweighs mine.  For the first time in my career I feel gun shy on this skill. 

Question:  Should coaching be incognito?  Meaning, do I say “this is coaching”?  When I read the three questions in today’s blog, I wonder… are these my reflection/ assessment of them or are these behaviors that they believe need to change?  

Here was my reply:

Dear Carolyn,

I always love your insight and your interaction with my writing. I want you to know you make me a better writer when you ask probing questions like this.

I actually think "coaching" has become a catch all phrase for interacting with people. So I do think it is important to know how you distinguish coaching from other types of conversations.  I actually had someone say to me one time that coaching is nothing more than what we used to do with friends when we had a deep conversation.  Frankly, I completely disagree with that sentiment!

Coaching is a specific set of skills that allow you to take someone from where they currently are (think behavior or performance) to a place THEY want to be.  It can be formal or informal, but the focus is THEY have to want it. 

The coachee has to see the need to change the behavior and then want help in getting there. 

When deciding whether or not I am going to coach someone, the first thing I must understand is their motivation for change. If they are motivated, then I can help. If they are not motivated, then I will decline the client gracefully. 

I know this is different in my world than yours. You are often asked to coach people who may not (at least at first) want or even see the need for the change.  I am of the opinion then that your task becomes helping them see the need for change.  Not motivating them, but inspiring them to see the change which could be of such great benefit to them. 

The more I am in the field of executive coaching the more convinced I become that if the person is not motivated, then the likelihood of getting any kind of sustainable change is negligible. You can get short-term behavioral compliance when offering extrinsic motivation like more money or time off, but this is transactional and possibly even a bit coercive. At best, it is authoritarian with an obvious power gradient.  As coaches what we want to be is inspirational and transformational for those we work with.

Now to a second element in your question I noticed: experience.  You have more than enough through your long career in nursing and leadership. They may have more functional experience based upon your current assignment, but you have more leadership experience.  

We must start to see leadership (of which coaching is a tool) as a discipline, just like nursing is a discipline.  Just because someone has more nursing experience does not make them a better leader. These are very different disciplines.

Have confidence in yourself that you can lead them and lean on your faith and your experience as a leader. 

This is why when people ask me if someone will be a good executive leader the first question I ask myself is “If I take them out of their functional area as a leader and drop them in another functional area, could they thrive?”

So, for example, could I take someone like you out of nursing and put you in another area in the hospital to lead? Say outpatient Emergency Room (ER). You may not have functional ER experience, but you have leadership. In a short time you can learn the management or functional side of ER.

I may not put you in as an ER nurse, or a nurse unit manager, but I would put you in as a leader. Knowing you like I do, I would have no hesitation in doing this tomorrow.

Finally, a third element you asked about are the 3 questions (Getting people to Start, Stop, Continue behaviors); are they reflections or discussions.  I think the answer is yes! 

As a coach you need to have in mind what behavior someone needs to stop doing. The interesting thing here is you can not ask a human to stop doing something without starting a new behavior.  Think getting people to stop smoking. We can not just ask them to stop, but we need to give them something else, something less harmful to do, like START chewing gum.

The one thing I have learned over my years in coaching is behaviors have to be substituted to get the change desired.

I think a good coach will have reflected on this and then thought through the STOP and START needed. This reflection is vital if you are going to serve the person you are coaching well. Then, after reflection, I think you enter into discussion with the person to gauge their level of motivation and desire for the change you are going to ask them to make.

My Goal

As a coach I want to be more like Parker Palmer.  

The main reason I wrote this post is that I realized after I had hit the send button on my email back to Carolyn that I did not ask her one question about the email she had sent.  I fell right into giving some light advice.  While I will admit that doing this really stroked my own ego and made me feel pretty good that someone in a leadership position like Carolyn would ask me a question about a topic I am passionate enough to write about.

But I quickly realized that I fell right into that old trap of giving advice instead of stimulating Carolyn’s “inner teacher.”

Carolyn, I do hope you will forgive me.

Parker, I will try and do better next time.

7 Steps To Effective Coaching

There are times when I want to start new things but hesitate because I am afraid I won’t know what to do. I felt this way for a long time with Facebook and LinkedIn. Everyone was doing it, it seemed simple and fun, but I didn’t want to look silly if I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know what to do, so I sat on the sideline and watched rather than jumping in and learning. I felt with same way with this blog. For over a year, I wrestled with the idea. Should I start blogging? What would I say? What would other people think about what I had to say? All this negativity swirled around in my mind.

Then one day I listened to a podcast by Michael Hyatt. I remember Michael saying something like, “Stop thinking about it and start doing it." He gave 5 simple steps that I followed to start my blog. And shazam! Here we are today. Those steps gave me the confidence I needed to start something I wanted to do.

This got me thinking; There are probably people out there that have this similar problem. Maybe there are people hesitant to coach others simply because they don’t know where to start. Maybe this is you! If only you had an outline of steps to take that would give you the confidence you need to do it.

This led me to reflect on what I do when I get a coaching client for the first time and outline the major ingredients that go into every coaching engagement that I do. Please enjoy my recipe for a successful coaching engagement in 7 simple steps below and try putting them to practice.

(I think this model is transferable. So if you are a professional coach, a supervisor of employees, or a Mom or Dad coaching a youth soccer team, following these 7 steps can mean the difference for your outcome being successful!)

7 Steps To Successful Coaching

• Begin With an Open Mind Coaching never begins in a vacuum. We all come into coaching relationships with biases. Coaches must come to clients with an open mind. The client must be seen as being a whole and healthy person. While there are times when you will have received information from others, focus on what the client is saying to you.

• Get to Know Your Client It is hard to coach without knowing more information about your client. Find out more about who they are, what they do, their life story, and what they hope to accomplish. Consider putting together a series of questions that could apply to any client you serve. Personally, I use multiple types of assessments with my clients.

• Confirm With the Client It is always important that you validate the collected data with the client. You want the client to be confident that you understand their perspective on what is happening, why the did what they did, or what is the genesis of how they are thinking or feeling.

• Compare the Data to a Standard Once the client agrees with the collected data, you'll compare it to an acceptable standard. The client must agree that the standard is acceptable. If they do not, then the data may become meaningless because the objective of what the data revealed could become irrelevant. For example, I had a client who gave the appearance of being arrogant. The data we collected from others in the organization said this person’s primary objective was to get their own way all the time. This behavior is the polar opposite of what is expected in the organization: being collaborative. Before I can coach the person to a more collaborative style, they have to agree that collaboration is the right standard. Once this happens we can begin work on the arrogance. If collaboration isn’t the mutually agreed upon goal then it is tough to improve the behavior.

• Identify Gaps Gaps are the space that exist between the client's current behavior and the agreed upon standard. They are the difference between where the client is now and where they would like to be in the future.It is useful to talk these gaps out and to get examples of where they have taken place. Coaches should always be looking for gaps between current and expected performance.

• Set a Plan to Close the Gaps When planning with your clients, develop a simple plan that is laser focused on one or two items. When we give people too much we lose focus and the person runs the risk of being overwhelmed. When examining the performance standard I use the Stop/Start/Continue model. Here's how it works:

  • What behaviors do they need to stop?

  • What behaviors do they need to start?

  • What behaviors need to continue?

    • Do not short change the "continue" aspect. Often by stopping and starting a few simple things, people will see dramatic change. Most of the time they are doing a lot of things right, which you want to encourage to continue.

    • Establish a Date to Follow-Up It is my opinion that this step is where most coaching fails. There is no date set to follow-up, no check-in’s to see how the person is doing, and little to no interaction at all once a plan is put in place. Follow-up with those you coach is the most important part of the coaching relationship! I recommend scheduling all follow-up meetings with your client at the end of your sessions together. This will enforce some accountability on their end and help you maintain the relationship.

Coaching is a valuable skill for helping others become the best person they desire to become. Coaching skills are important tools that anyone in a leadership position needs to possess. Whether you have employees on your team or you are responsible for a group of 8-year-old girls on a soccer field, coaching is the transportation vehicle you use to help an idea become a behavior.

Homework

Identify a person in your life who needs your coaching, or better yet someone who is already getting your coaching. Think about whether you have followed all 7 steps to successful coaching within that relationship. Is there any step that you have missed? How can you use these 7 steps to coach yourself to improve your own coaching outcomes? We would love to hear from you regarding what you think about this process. Leave us a comment below!

Are You Ensuring This Happens After People Are Trained?

I have recently been working my way through a very interesting book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It is a very interesting perspective on founding, buying, selling, running, and investing in technology companies. The book is not really steeped in a lot of sound leadership theory, but is more about his own practical wisdom in working and leading in the technology space. 

One of the things that caught my eye was in a small section he wrote about employee retention. According to Ben, during his tenure at one of the tech companies he founded he decided to read all of the exit interviews for the entire company. He was amazed at the amount of money they were spending on talent recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding only to see this open drain on the back end of the company. It seemed they were losing people as fast as they could hire them.

According to Horowitz, when you put the economics aside (I assume he means people who say they are leaving for higher paying jobs that his organization couldn’t compete with) there were two primary reasons why people left:

1. They hated their direct manager. They often cited things like:

   • Lack of guidance

   • No career development

   • Feedback they received

2. They were not learning anything. 

He then goes on to make a case for the importance of training new employees to resolve some of these turnover issues.

Insert Coaching Here

While I am all for making sure that all employees get adequate training in their role, my experience is that training is just not enough. You can’t simply send employees to a training program and expect that your turnover numbers are going to go down. 

Horowitz quotes Andy Grove, the legendary CEO at Intel, who makes the economic case for training by saying that if a manager did a series of 4 lectures for their department, assuming 3 hours of prep for each hour of material, that is 12 hours of work in total. Say you have a department of 10 folks and next year they will work about 20,000 hours for the organization. If you get a 1 percent improvement in performance, the company gains about 200 hours of work as a result. It is easy to see the ROI by inserting a salary for the department and subtracting the managers salary-time.

I would like to take Grove’s ROI calculation one step further and insert coaching after the completion of training. 

Let’s assume that a manager then does two one-one one meetings each month with each of the employees on the team. Half of the time for these meetings is dedicated to coaching the employees after the training.

The manager has had plenty of time to observe the employees, evaluating their use of the training delivered. The manager can now use the observed behaviors to coach any little improvements that will help the employee become more productive.  

Let’s assume that this manager is really not that good of a coach, but is able to eke out another 1% of productivity from each of the employees as a result of the coaching. This becomes another 12 hours of work on the part of the manager (2hrs/month/employee + 10 minutes of prep on what coaching is needed).  Now another 200 hours of work improvement has just occurred as a result. 

Now we see that 4 hours of training (a one hour training session per quarter) and one hour of dedicated coaching to the training results in a net increase in 400 hours of productivity for the organization!

No Time for Training or Coaching

I had a client tell me one time that he just really didn’t have time to train or do one on one meetings with his team. The team had way too many tasks and priorities to take a break from their work to do any of this kind of development.  

The interesting thing to me was that I was hired as an executive coach to work with this person because the turnover rate in his organization was so high that those who were left were forced to take on the projects of the folks who were exiting.

This manager was symptomatically trying to solve his productivity issues by moving projects around on some kind of organizational chess board.

Instead of making the investment in the people to reduce the turn-over rate, the manager just wanted the folks who were left to work longer and harder. 

When I did an interview 360 and talked to this manager’s peers and the folks on his team, he was not very well liked or respected. One person I interviewed told me the manager was often quoted as stating “The workload will stay high until the teams performance improves.”

There was no coaching, no positive feedback, and no feeling of being developed. 

My job as this manager’s coach was to help him see that his unwillingness to invest in coaching the team was the productivity drag on the department. 

How about you?

Do you have 1 hour per quarter to provide a training for your team and 3 hours of follow-up after the training to get a 400% increase in your team’s productivity? 

Or does your team have so much to do that there is no time for training and coaching? 

Stay tuned for next week’s post where I am going to take on the topic of Good Coach/Bad Coach. I think this is a really important topic for those of you who buy into the importance of training and coaching and think you are good at it... Just because you do it, does that mean you are skilled?

Coaching Was a Turning Point for Me as a Leader

A few days ago I was on a video conference beginning a new coaching engagement with a client, Robert. In this initial meeting I walk the client through my typical coaching expectations; what Robert can expect from me as well as what I am expecting from him.  

In addition to myself and Robert, his supervisor is on the call, along with someone from Human Resources. It is really important that all of these parties are engaged in Robert’s development so that there is clarity of expectations and organizational support for Robert’s development.

When we had finished aligning expectations I asked Robert if he had any questions. He did not.

I asked if the HR rep had any questions. She did not.

Last, I asked Robert’s supervisor, Sam, if he had any questions. He did not, but he did have something powerful to say: ”I went through some coaching several years back and it was a turning point for me as a leader…” 

I couldn’t wait for Sam to finish the story and tell us all why the coaching he had received was so impactful, but there was dead silence on the phone.  In true coaching form, I waited through the silence, suppressing every urge inside of me to fill the air with noise just so the silence didn’t feel so lonely. 

After what seemed to me to be an eternity, Sam continued in a rather subdued tone that the coaching he received had uncovered that his strength had a dark side to it. 

Sam shared that his strength had always been in understanding and interpreting data. He possessed very strong analytical skills and a belief that the numbers told the story of the situation. He was a very rational thinker and an excellent long-term planner.  In addition to the scientific approach that he brought to his work, he was very self-confident - sure of himself with a strong ability to keep his composure.

Robert chimed in at this point and said, “I can see all of these things in you today. I have never worked with anyone whose analytical skills were as sharp as yours. In fact, there are times where I triple check things before I bring them to you because I want to make sure they are right.”

Sam replied, “And that is a good thing. We want to make sure the data is correct. However, for me, these strong analytical skills also came with a dark side. I was very skeptical of other people on the leadership team. I was distrustful of them and very cynical if they had an idea or wanted to change something without data to support their rationale. My focus on the negative became a real distraction to the point that people would stop coming to me with problems I could help them solve.”

At this point, the call seemed like a conversation between Robert and Sam. A conversation maybe they should have had a long time ago, but this coaching kick-off was giving them the safe space to talk. 

Robert said, “Sam, I don’t sense that in you at all. I do not see you as negative. I see people coming to you all the time to help them solve issues.”

To that, with a bit of pride in his voice, Said said, “Coaching was a turning point for me as a leader.”

What a powerful moment I had just witnessed. 

Sam’s coach was able to help him see how his strengths, while for sure personality assets, had also been holding him back in ways that he just didn’t see.

His coach helped him identify this dark side, or blind spot, then helped him put together a plan to take advantage of his strength while not over playing it to the point of dysfunction.

I am sure most of you can self-identify with Sam in this story. Like Sam, we all have strengths and weaknesses. You may be really confident in what you are good at, but can you identify some places where your strengths are not serving you? Are you overplaying them?

Perhaps you are really good at relationship building, but there are times you are overly cooperative and say yes when you should say no.

Perhaps you are a real risk taker, but there are times where your thrill seeking has landed you in a bad place.

Perhaps you are very colorful and the life of the party, but you walk away from conversations not having heard what the others in the room have even said. (And that is if you even consider there were other people in the room at all.)

One of the great things coaching can do for you is to help you focus on your strengths so that you use them to the best of your ability, but not over play them. I hope you are able to use your coach in this manner. It is one of the true values that coaching can bring to any relationship.

Does Your Organization Implement All Three of These Ideas in Developing Leaders?

Even as a guy who loves to read and write about the topic of leadership development, I have some real empathetic understanding for those who do not think the investment in leaders is worth the return on the investment (ROI). While I do not totally agree, I am open to listening to their perspective.

Barbara Kellerman, leadership guru out of Harvard University, has entered into the discussion on the value of leadership development. In her new book, Professionalizing Leadership., she takes issue with the leadership development industry because of the message that it sends; “Take my course, or come to my workshop, or take my executive program, and you too can learn to be a leader.” Kellerman’s main beef with the leadership development industry is that other professions take the task of learning or mastering a field and a particular set of skills much more seriously and much more thoroughly. The main concern as I understand Kellerman’s point is that leadership development is packaged as an event rather than a discipline.

I agree with this summation.

Those of us in leadership development have to get away from positioning our value proposition as an event and start thinking more about how we approach leadership as a life long discipline.

For example, a training course in personality or emotional intelligence can give a leader a self-awareness tool. Nothing more. It is up to the leader to take this information and become a student of how it informs their understanding and approach to the practice of leadership.  

If you are going to lead, you can not just wake up and say “Today I think I will try to instill some vision into the group I am with.” Leadership is a discipline, just like chemistry, finance, or project management. According to Donald Schon in his book The Reflective Practitioner, these professions are “essential to the very functioning of our society.”

No person in any organization can be a leader without some other set of skills. If you want to be a sales leader, then you have to become skillful at sales and at leadership. If you want to be a leader in finance, then you must learn both disciplines, leadership and finance.

Interestingly, what I find in most organizations is that we take those who are most successful in a functional discipline, like finance, and once they show proficiency and skill at financial reporting and the inner workings of EBITA then the discussion turns to giving that person a team to lead. Most often, there is no thought of what the leadership experience or knowledge or education of that person is.

The mistake that is made is in the thinking that because this person has excelled in a particular skill, or because they were number one in their class at an Ivy League School, they must be a leader.

While I am not saying it is impossible for this person who has proven mastery of a skill to be a leader, the mistake is one Robert Sternberg ,in his chapter on foolishness in The Handbook of Wisdom, calls “fallacies of relevance.”

These errors are committed when the premise of an argument has no bearing on its conclusion. For example, just because Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player to ever play the sport does not mean he can coach. 

Sternberg would call this all too common behavior in organizations: foolishness. It means that intelligence is no protection agains bad decisions. 

Let’s say you had an opening in your organization for a financial analyst. A resume comes across your desk for a person  with no education in finance, no knowledge of terms or how financial data fits together, and zero experience in finance. Would you hire this person for your opening and expect them to meet organizational expectations?

No, of course you wouldn’t!

You would be looking for resumes of people who went to school for a number of years to learn the academic ins and outs of finance, then got a job in the field, had some people in an organization show them the ropes, maybe even was assigned a mentor. At the very least, they had the ability to learn from the “school of hard knocks” about what works and what doesn’t work.

Let’s think of it another way. Would you ever hire someone for a finance role who was an organizational leadership major? Let them lead the team and say, “No worries, they will just learn the finance piece.” Outside of an introductory sales or administrative role, I have never heard of this happening!

The Reason for Wrong Thinking In Leadership Development

There are three things I believe those who want to be effective organizational leaders need to focus on when making decisions about who is in a leadership role in an organization:

1. Leadership Education.
   
   Education is about gathering general knowledge as part of facilitating the learning process. It comprises important elements such as grounded theory, core values, accepted beliefs, socially acceptable habits, and proven skills.  A leader should know the difference between transactional and servant leadership and how followers react to each. Basic education is a necessity prior to someone going into training. If you try to train someone without some knowledge they may be able to learn the skill, but will not be able to transfer that learning to complex situations that arise.

2. Leadership Training.
   
   Training is about acquiring skills and behaviors with the goal of improving performance. A leader might go to a training class to learn about personality types and be trained in how to use personality to improve communication. Without some education on what personality theory is, the leader is armed with a tool they do not understand and, therefore, cannot use to the benefit of themselves or the organization.

3. Leadership Development.
   
   Leadership Development is the ongoing use of leadership education and training that is building and expanding the persons capacity to lead. This idea of development starts with the individual and then must expand to the broader organization to ensure healthy organizational growth.

These three very distinct aspects of leadership are all critical to growing leaders in organizations.

Back to the “Is it worth It” Question

While ROI is pretty easy to calculate on an investment like a stock, the calculation gets messy when we start to try and calculate the complexity of human behavior.

While many have offered formulas, the deterministic approach often leaves readers scratching their heads as a small investment in leadership development ends up showing 600% returns. It is so unbelievable that most people just dismiss the numbers out of hand. 

Maybe instead of being so deterministically calculating we ought to rely on another mathematic discipline to determine value of developing our leaders; statistics. More specifically, probability. 

What are the chances that without investing fully in developing leaders that our business will succeed? Before you start developing assumptions to generate your answer, why don’t we turn to logic to answer the question for us?

What are the chances that without investing in the education, training, and development of our finance department that our business will succeed?

I think you have your answer.

Do You Have Enough Relational Empathy?

Last week’s blog post was really cathartic for me. I wrote a reflection on 2018 from the work I had done with clients and the kinds of big picture things I was noticing. If you haven’t seen it yet you can take a look here.

One of the things I have been observing is how important relational empathy is becoming in organizations.

Clarifying Question

After that post, I got an email from a reader that pushed back on the idea of needing more relational empathy. The point this person was making was that they had a job to do, and it was their job to “stay in their lane” and represent sales. That if marketing had a problem, well, that was up to them to solve.

I have to admit, I used to think this way as well. When our organizations were silos of departments and functional expertise was valued over anything else, this “stay in your lane” mentality ruled.

But I would argue that our world is changing too fast to keep this line of thinking. 

I am finishing a book now by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Thomas Friedman, titled Thank You For Being Late. Friedman spends a lot of time unpacking the idea of Moore’s Law, which is really more of an observation from the technology world-the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years-giving exponential growth to computing power. 

The silo organization is dead. Individuals working in teams is the only way to achieve success.

Last week in my blog I wrote this about Relational Empathy:

I don’t know if this is a symptom of our political climate or not, but people have become so polar. They have an idea or a framework for how the world should be and they stick to it no matter how silly it makes them look. Maybe this is a natural outcome of divisions of labor, where those trained in finance wear finance glasses and only see the world through finance. Or, how those who are trained and educated in marketing only see the world through a marketing lens.  As leaders we seem to have lost the skill of trying to understand where the other person is coming from, and, even more important, what it is like to be them. We are so concerned with our own selfish ambition and desires that we have lost sight of the perspective of other ways of seeing and doing.

Relational

Let me unpack the relational part of this concept. 

Maureen O’Hara from the Center for Studies of the Person writes of two distinct frameworks for thinking about the self. There is the Western view that sees the self as ego-centric. This is an individualistic, self-centered perspective. 

There is also a pre-European (i.e. India or Mexico) view that sees the self as socio-centric. The person is seen as participating in the world around them.

O’Hara gives a great example by observing the family.

Those from the West, when they speak of family, will often say that they “have a family”. Note the possessiveness.

Those from the pre-European perspective say that they “belong to a family.” Notice the inclusiveness.

Most of the readers of this blog are from a Western perspective of the self. So, when it comes to relationships, we think in terms of possessing or “having friends” as opposed to “belonging to” a friend group.

To be relational, leaders need to have the ability to establish and maintain mutually satisfying relationships that have both “give” and “take” where compassion and trust are expressed in both word and deed.

Empathy

According to American psychologist Carl Rogers, "The state of empathy or being empathetic is to perceive the internal from of reference of another with accuracy, and with the emotional components and meaning which pertain thereto, as if one were the other person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition.” 

This means that as a leader you are aware of and sense the emotion (disappointment, hurt, rejection) of someone on your team AND you perceive this emotion just like they do without losing the awareness that it is “AS IF” you were disappointed, hurt, or rejected. This is what differentiates empathy and sympathy.

Relational Empathy

Relational empathy is about establishing and maintaining mutually satisfying relationships “AS IF” you were the other person.  One of the best examples of a leader having relational empathy that I have seen in a long time is in a book by Ben Horowitz titled The Hard Thing About Hard Things. The story is on page 47 if you get a copy of the book. 

Allow me to paraphrase:

Ben is the CEO of a tech company in Silicon Valley and had bought a small technology company in North Carolina, Tangram. During the deal, the CEO of Tangram, John, started experiencing headaches. In addition, as part of the purchase, John would not be joining Ben’s company. Turns out, John had brain cancer and since he was not joining the new company would not have health insurance, as it was ruled a pre-existing condition. Ben did not owe John anything and the cost to the company for COBRA was over $200,000. Ben’s company was in no financial shape to be merciful. Bottom line, this was not Ben’s problem.

Ben’s company was in a fight for its life, but then, Ben realized, so was John.

So Ben decided to pay for John’s health cost. “We will find the money elsewhere in the budget,” he said.

John died 15 months later.

Ben reflects, “I guess I did it because i knew what desperation felt like.”

Now that is relational empathy!

Do You Share These Observations Regarding Leadership Momentum?

There are not many folks from about mid-December through mid-January who are wanting to engage in new coaching or training opportunities, so each year I use those weeks for reflection and planning. 

In addition the clients I am currently working with, I am regularly adding new coaching clients into my practice throughout the year. With that in mind, an important area to reflect on as one year ends a new one begins is the future of my coaching practice. How many new clients will I engage this year? Who will they be? What will my coaching practice look like in the coming months? It is important to thoughtfully reflect on these questions in order to determine how I can proactively plan for a successful year for both myself and my clients.

Another area of my professional life that I reflect on is the work my clients have asked me to do with them. I begin by looking at my calendar to observe all the work I did in the past 12 months. I look at all the times I spent teaching, training, facilitating, coaching, creating content, etc. Then, I ask myself a really hard question: Is the work I am doing still relevant? Is it meaningful for those who call on me to work with leaders in their organization?

Finally, I spend time in personal reflection and journaling. Perhaps most importantly, reflecting on how I spend my time, then comparing this data with what I really enjoy doing in my work life.

Momentum

One way to look at whether or not I am relevant is by using the idea of momentum. This is a concept that I borrow from the world of personal investing and finance.

One of the personal finance newsletters I read on a very regular basis is Sound Mind Investing. (You can learn more about them at www.soundmindinvesting.com.)

In the January 2019 newsletter, Matt Bell writes about the concept of momentum. According to Matt:

“A fundamental mistake many investors make is to move too quickly in choosing investments. They read about a hot stock or this year’s best performing mutual fund and jump in. It’s all very ad hoc and reactive.”

Matt goes on to write that “Momentum is the idea that the recent past performance tends to persist-that is, it tends to continue, at least into the near term future.”

This means that what has happened in the recent past is likely to continue into the near future. It is what we know to be true from the world of physics; that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest stays at rest.

Momentum in the financial world becomes an objective measure of what is going on in the marketplace so that the investor can build a strategy based on real data and not just turn on the TV and be moved to buy a stock by some talking head in the moment.

Momentum Analysis

As I analyzed my journaling from this past year, here are 4 things I noticed:

1. Emotional Intelligence remains an important leadership construct. This is true for both the training work I do as well as the coaching. Most of the time when leaders hire me there is some growth desired in this area. I think Dan Goleman got it right when he wrote, “What really matters for success, character, happiness, and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills - your EQ - not just purely cognitive abilities…” Organizations put so much emphasis on how smart and skillful people are that they often miss this other very important dynamic of the “how” they work with others.

2. Relational empathy. I don’t know if this is a symptom of our political climate or not, but people have become so polar. They have an idea or a framework for how the world should be and they stick to it no matter how silly it makes them look. Maybe this is a natural outcome of divisions of labor, where those trained in finance wear finance glasses and only see the world through finance. Or, how those who are trained and educated in marketing only see the world through a marketing lens.  As leaders we seem to have lost the skill of trying to understand where the other person is coming from, and, even more important, what it is like to be them. We are so concerned with our own selfish ambition and desires that we have lost sight of the perspective of other ways of seeing and doing.

3. Being flexible in ambiguous times. I was on a call with a potential client toward the end of the year whose organization has been turned upside down. Half of the people have either been laid off or reassigned new roles. There is a tremendous amount of ambiguity about what certain jobs actually are and what people are supposed to do everyday. I was asked to talk with the team about the impact of emotions during times of tension and what to watch for as leaders when working with others. I was interrupted with a question in the middle of my presentation when one well meaning soul said, “Dr. Livingston, enough already about helping people process the loss they have experienced, can you just help us get to a place where things are normal and we can all just get back to work?” My response? “This is your new normal. Learning to be emotionally flexible and helping people deal with where they are in the moment is a new calling for leaders.”

4. Connecting with talent. The December stock market slide, not withstanding the economic outlook and, more specifically, the jobs outlook, is really robust. Senior leaders need to make sure they are connecting with talent, because my sense is that talent is itching for new opportunities. I think senior leaders need to get much better at proactively scheduling time to connect and care about the talent in the organization. Take them for coffee. Schedule a lunch. Learn what is on their mind. You do not need to do another ROI calculation on some process. What you really need to do is ensure you have the talent on your team to turn the future you are planning for into a reality.

How about you? Do you agree with these 4 observations? Leave a comment or send an email. I would love to connect with you to talk about these observations, or your unique observations regarding your organization.

Best hopes for the coming year,

Scott

Do Not Forget to Do This When You Turn to Setting Your 2019 Goals

Now that the Christmas season is behind us, many leaders will be turning their sights to goal setting for 2019.

A noble cause, to be sure.

Goals can help leaders:

1. Stay focused on priorities.

2. Ensure they are challenging themselves.

3. Set milestones to measure progress.

And, according to the literature on goal setting theory:

1. Give the leader a great deal of self-confidence in accomplishing the objectives.

If you are in need of some deep thinking time to better understand what your goals should be, you can download my Minimalist’s Guide to a 4-Hour Personal Leadership Retreat by clicking here. This guide is intended to give you some structure for a creative thinking process as you consider what you want to put the emphasis on in your life this year.

A Quick Story

A past client called me recently after being “downsized” from his organization. As we talked about his situation, he told me “Last time I took a job it was because it was convenient. I didn’t have to move and I knew I could do the work. I was not passionate about the work, but I knew I could do it.”

As we talked about what he wanted to do in this next transition he was much more clear and principled. “I want something where I can use my skills as a leader, doing what I am most passionate about. It really doesn’t matter where it it is or necessarily what industry it is in. If it is something I love getting up to do, that is what I am looking for.”

As I hung up the phone from talking to him I could really tell the difference between his first transition and this one. 

He was following his heart and he was principled in his quest.

Consider examining your principles prior to goal setting

One of my favorite leadership quotes of all time is from the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland:

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”

I think many leaders adopt this philosophy as a reason for goal setting, to give themselves some priorities on what they want to accomplish in a given year.

The problem is that we as leaders can often set goals that will get things done, but are not goals we truly believe in or are not important to us at all.

For example, I can set a goal to shoot an 80 for 18 holes in golf, but if I do not believe it is possible because I currently shoot 95, then what good is having the goal? Sure, it is a goal, but it is not principled.

What is a principle?

As I researched this question a few years ago for a leadership workshop I led, here is what the literature said about principles.  Most definitions include aspects of the following:

• An accepted or professed rule of action, or a doctrine for conduct.

• A truth that can be followed.

• A guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct.

In summary, a principle is some type of relevant, moral, accepted standard that the leader believes in which guides their underlying behavior.

Your principles inform your development goals

If this idea of having a principle inform a goal is new to you, let me give you some steps you can use to create a principle that supports a behavior that you can then set a goal around.

1. Find agreement and define the dimension you are setting a goal around.
   
   For example, if I want to improve my coaching skills as a goal, I would make sure that coaching is a leadership behavior and then give myself a definition for what coaching means to me.
   
   Coaching: An interaction between a coach and a coachee that unlocks the full potential of the person being coached. In a coaching relationships, the coachee is transformed in both belief and behavior in an encouraging, supportive manner.

2. The next step in the process is to think about the Dominant Ideas that surround the leadership dimension. Ask yourself questions like:

   1. What are the important skills that support this behavior?

   2. How do I want my followers to feel when I am using this leadership dimension?

   3. Why is this dimension important to me as a leader?

3. After you have answered these question then ask yourself:

   What does being a “good” coach (in this case) look like and how is that different from being a “great” coach?
   
   The idea is to let go of any outcomes here and to focus on quality inputs.  Resist the temptation to say that a great coach obtains a maximum bonus payout at the end of the year; or that a great coach wins championships. Instead, focus more on the behaviors of what a great coach actually does. Things like building rapport, attuning, and listening skill.

4. Finally, go back and review these three steps and just sit and think about them. Meditate on them so that the primary ideas become really clear to you. After some time, write a single sentence that describes the principle so that it represents what your idea or belief is in coaching.
   
   Example: Create a safe environment for discussions where the coachee feels valued and heard, supported and challenged, and knows I have their best interest in mind.

The challenge I have for you as you are thinking about your goals for 2019 is to not only think about what you want to get done, but also why this goal is so important to you and how you want to go about reaching it.

As you think about the why and the how, I do hope you will become a principle centered leader as you set and attain your goals.

A Prescription for Being A Wise Leader

Because it is Christmas Eve I am fairly confident that if you are reading this post at all, you are in one of three places:

1. At work regretting not saving one more vacation day this year.

2. Others assume you are working, but that you have scheduled yourself at an “offsite meeting” of undisclosed location.

3. On vacation, but just couldn’t help yourself and had to check your email because it is a Monday morning.

No matter where these thoughts find you this day, I want to note that this post is a little different than my usual organizational leadership musings. So, you have been warned.

Perhaps this is because as I am writing this my own heart and mind are turning to the Christmas holiday and the precious time my wife Kim and I will get to spend with our kids, their spouses, and my adorable granddaughter. However, our time with our family will not start until later on Christmas Day when our daughter and her husband arrive at our home in Florida.

This means that today, on Christmas Eve, if you are opening this post early, Kim and I will be at the gym for our morning workout. If you are reading midmorning I then will be having a brunch meeting with my good friends Bob and Pat who serve in ministry at Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU). Or, if you decided to sleep in and are reading this later in the day, I will likely be off to a matinee with Kim before we head to our Christmas Eve service at church.

I have to admit that one of my favorite church services all year is Christmas Eve. 

One thing I really I love about the Christmas Eve service at almost any church I have ever attended is that it is almost guaranteed that the song “O Holy Night” will be sung.

There is just something about this song that sends a chill down my spine. I get this huge adrenaline rush as the song begins slowly;

 “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of the dear saviors birth.”

Even as the song begins I find myself lost in the lyrics. Then the song builds in intensity as it moves along until it hits the crescendo verse still remembering that special night;

“O night divine,” the verse repeats softly and slowly, “O night divine.” 

What I love about this song is that it implores us to remember that night, and not only to acknowledge it but to remember it as something really unique in the history of the world: a savior was born for man to come back into relationship with God.

I have been thinking a lot recently about why that song is so impactful for me, and I think it is because the song takes me to a place in my mind that I do not go to enough…my imagination.

I am so evidence and fact based in my approach to leadership development (and life) that I often miss that creative, imaginative side of who I am.

So, why am I writing this to you as practitioners and gurus in the field of organizational leadership?

Because I don’t want you to miss this very important aspect in leadership that just does not get enough press these days…wisdom in leadership. 

We put so much focus on effective leadership I often wonder if we are missing the boat in doing so. I would argue that perhaps we need to be less concerned with how effective our leaders are and put more emphasis on how wise they are!

So, how do we evaluate wisdom in ourselves as leaders and in those we lead? Here are five things you can use from the wisdom leadership literature as a checklist:

1.  Wise leaders use careful observations and reason to reach better decisions.

2. Wise leaders take into account not only rational and factual evidence, but also non-rational aspects such as emotional intelligence, foresight, and imagination. 

3. Wise leaders value humane and virtuous outcome. 

4. Wise leaders make decisions that are practical and oriented towards everyday life.

5. Wise leaders understand the aesthetic dimensions of their work, are articulate when communicating, and believe in contributing to the good life of all.

Perhaps the most notable in this list is number two, so don’t miss it -- wise leaders take into account both the rational and the imagination.

My hope for you this Christmas season is that you will be awestruck not only by the evidence that you can see, but also that you are amazed this season by your own imagination. And, in doing so, that you would find yourself growing in wisdom as a leader.

Take in every moment this holiday season and let your heart be filled with gratitude and wonder.

Be blessed.

Invest In Your Future Today

I received a call from a client the other day, let’s call him Steve, who I have not worked with in a couple years.  He had moved on to a new job with a new company and one of his assignments is to identify and prepare leaders for the growth his organization is planning over the next five to seven years.

As I listened to Steve talk about the challenges the organization will face, it became clear to both of us that the leadership talent needed for the future does not currently exist in the organization. 

At the end of the conversation, Steve said something that really stuck with me, “Sure, we can go out and get talent when we need it, but then we waste 12 to 18 months of them figuring things out and learning our culture. We need to grow our talent so that we can harvest it when we need it most!”

I hung up the phone from talking with Steve and my next call was with an old friend who I talk with once a month or so, we’ll call him Sam. Sam and I will usually spend some time talking about our IRA’s and retirement. What is interesting is that Sam and I had both spoken to our financial advisors the week prior regarding how nervous we are about the stock market moving up and down. Both of our advisors told us that the only way for us to reach our financial goals was to stay in the market.  

Both Sam and I heard loud and clear from two different sources that the only way for us to hit our financial goals was to stay invested. The reason for this is because of the value of investing and compound interest. You really do not see the value of compound interest for a few years, but once it kicks in the growth is quite substantial.

Then it hit me.

The conversation I had with Steve and the conversation I had with Sam were really the same conversation. 

One was about growing financial resources to achieve a goal, and the other was about growing human resources to achieve a goal.

Both of them require an initial investment. Both of them require some rides up and down the growth curve. This takes patience, impulse control, and a lot of putting fear in its proper place.

The question I am asking myself these days is how many senior executives have their retirement portfolio totally stashed in a money market account that is drawing 1% interest? My guess is zero of them. 

So, why are we not investing in talent in the same strategic way that we are investing for our retirement?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop me a comment below or shoot me an email.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Henry Kissinger is famous for saying that one of the most difficult things for a young leader to do is to “speak truth to power;' to go up the power gradient with information that is contrary to what the hierarchical, authoritative, and referent position believes to be true.

There is inherent organizational danger when communicating things to a leader that they may not be seeing:

• You could be rejected, which leads to embarrassment.

• You could be dismissed, which leads to self-doubt.

• You could be humiliated, which leads to isolation.

• You could be discounted, which leads to demoralization.

Alternately, there is huge upside in communicating to a leader what they are not seeing in the moment:

• You could be celebrated for the input.

• You could be included in the decision-making process.

• You could be honored for your courage.

• You could be valued for your contribution.

Whether a reality or a figment of our imagination as a young leader, “speaking truth to power” can be overwhelming. This is the risk tension that the young leader must face.

Receptivity of the Leader

No matter the current stage of our leadership journey, we have all been there at some point and can relate to emotion of the young leader when faced with the risky decision to “speak truth to power.”

However, it could be argued that the senior leader has even more at stake.

Unless they create a safe environment in which others feel the freedom to share, the senior leader runs the risk of missing key information that may never find its way to them. With that in mind, much of the burden falls on the senior leader to create an atmosphere that mitigates the risk for the young leader.

How are you doing in this area?

5 TIPS FOR CREATING A CULTURE THAT HEARS

Here are my top 5 tips for leaders who want to improve their chances of hearing the information they need in order to make informed decisions and lead well:

• Slow down your cadence.
  
  Most of the leadership mistakes I have made were because my world was moving too fast and I did not slow down in order to see more possibilities. The faster I went the more convinced I became that I was right, and the further away I got from the truth. Take a deep breath, count to 10, sip a warm beverage, pray, do whatever you need to do in order to slow your pace.
  
  

• Become curious.
  
  Suspend your need to be right and work really hard to understand an alternate position. Before you jump to a conclusion or shoot down an opposing opinion, spend some time to discern the message they are bringing to you.
  
  

• Always say thank you.
  
  You would be surprised how often I observe leaders who turn and walk away from an interaction without expressing gratitude. Very rarely, if ever, is their intent to be unkind or degrading, however, the pressure of the moment takes the brain to the next thing rather than allowing them to focus on being fully present in their current interaction, with awareness and sensitivity to the needs of the relationship. Researchers at USC found that simple acts of gratitude provide benefits ranging from feelings of reward and satisfaction to simply helping people to hold on to their humanity. Try the simple act of saying “thank you” more often and see how it might contribute to more open communication.
  
  

• Spend time reflecting.
  
  At the end of your day, take the time to review. Play back the interactions you had with others, resisting the temptation to become defensive. Ask yourself questions such as, I wonder what they were really trying to ask me? Why did I feel such a strong need to defend myself? Why did I feel such a strong need to exert power in the moment? What unintended consequences could my actions have? Be honest with yourself as you learn and grow from the challenges and successes.
  
  

• Do the inner work of developing your soul.
  
  Psychology data says you are as intelligent right now as you will ever be. Your personality is fully formed, so you know if you are extroverted or introverted. You have most of the skill you will ever need. With that in mind, what is your next step in development? Could it be that you need to work on developing the soul of your leadership?
  

HOMEWORK

Pick one of the 5 tips above and work on it every day for a week. For example, in every personal interaction and every email you send, say “thank you." Work on making your attitude heartfelt, and let me know what outcomes you see. I’d love to know how these tips contribute to more open communication within your team or organization.

Should Turkeys Decide on Thanksgiving Dessert?

What came to mind when you read the title of today’s post?

Actually, what I am more curious about is whether you understand what I mean when I write “Should turkeys decide on Thanksgiving dessert?”

As we in the United States begin to think about our Thanksgiving tradition, much of our communication seems to get lost in our ability (or inability) to create shared meaning. This has really been on my mind a lot because I have been asked by 4 separate groups recently if I would facilitate a Stop/Start/Continue session for cross functional teams who are struggling as they work together.

If you are not familiar with the concept of Stop/Start/Continue sessions, click here to learn about it.

As I think about teams creating shared meaning together, I really like what Chip and Dan Heath write about in their book The Power of Moments. They have some interesting research showing that for groups of people, creating shared meaning is about "highlighting the mission that binds the members together and supersedes our differences.”

When thinking about organizations, many teams could benefit from time to focus on the greater mission that they are on together.

As we in the United States look forward to our Thanksgiving celebration with family and friends, the same focus might be needed.

The question I think we would all do well to consider this Thanksgiving is:

When is the last time you laughed together as a group?

Your knee jerk reaction to that question might be simply the last time someone said or did something funny. Turns out, this answer is mostly wrong.

According to Robert Povine, a neuroscience researcher at the University of Maryland, laughter has more to do with relationships than with the actual joke. Povine’s research shows that people are 30 times more likely to laugh in social settings than when they are alone.

Laughter, it seems, is more about relationships than humor.

As you read the title of the blog post today, you might not have laughed out loud, but if you asked this question at your Thanksgiving meal, what might happen amongst the group?

Could something as simple as a silly question create a positive shared experience that results in deeper connection, and perhaps even the awareness that we are part of something bigger than ourselves?

You might not have a joke or a funny story to share around your table (although you could see what kind of reaction the question from the title of this post might get), but I want to share my top 10 thoughts on Thanksgiving from some research (albeit, internet, not scholarly journals) I have been doing on the topic.

Please feel free to borrow one of two of these thoughts as you engage your colleagues or family this week. In fact, why not turn the TV off for an hour and just talk about the holiday?

Who knows, you just might create some shared meaning and connection in the process.

Without further adieu, here are my Top 10 thoughts about Thanksgiving:

1. Most people will enjoy a 40% shorter work week in celebration of the holiday.

2. 42 million of you will travel at least 50 miles or more this weekend. (American Automobile Association)

3. 4,500 Calories will be consumed by the average American on Thanksgiving Day. (Calorie Control Council)

4. Over 100 million of you will gather with you family and friends and watch as many as 15 hours of television.. Approximately 75% of this viewing will be watching the triple header of NFL football.

5. 91% of Americans will eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day. (And, if you are like my family, for days and days after.)

6. Tryptophan is an amino acid found in turkey meat that is often blamed for the drowsiness after a Thanksgiving Meal. However, turkey contains the same amount of tryptophan as most other meats, so the drowsiness is likely from all the carbohydrates causing an increase in melatonin in your brain. When this happens, you get a bit sleepy.

7. Abraham Lincoln is credited with proclaiming the first Thanksgiving Day.

8. An overabundance of turkey (about 260 tons) is the inspiration for TV dinners. To get rid of all the turkey, a salesman at Swanson Company filled 5,000 aluminum trays with turkey, corn bread dressing, gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes. In their first year of production, the 98 cent dinner sold 10 million units. 

9. 50 million pumpkin pies will be eaten on Thanksgiving Day.

10. Black Friday is not only a busiest shopping day of the year, but according to Roto-Rooter, it is also the busiest day for plumbers.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Who Would You Call in the Middle of the Night If You Were Sick or Afraid?

It is my experience over many years of working with leaders that they do not like to think about topics that could be perceived as weak or powerless.

There is often a pervasive air of self-confidence and self-assurance that is required to lead others. Any crack in this proverbial leadership armor can be viewed as having an inability to lead.

Back in the 1940’s, several researchers independently described the relationship between personality and leadership behavior. One of the factors they noted was that individuals who scored highly on a factor known as neuroticism, or emotional instability, were not as effective at making good decisions or having the confidence needed to build strong relationships. 

On one end of the neuroticism leadership personality dimension are leaders who are very temperamental. They are flippant in the expression of emotion, often not caring at all how they come across to others. Theses leaders see ordinary situations as threatening and even the smallest of irritations can set them off.

The other end of this spectrum are leaders who have emotional stability. They have a higher tolerance for stressful situations. Most things simply do not bother them, and if something does get under their skin they do not hold the frustration for long. Leaders who rate low on neuroticism are very optimistic in the face of setbacks and have a high level of hope for the future. 

Leaders who score low on neuroticism are what we call in today’s positive psychology terminology, happy.  Happiness, in the emotional intelligence world, is known as well-being.

My Story

I was walking through the Denver airport today waiting on a flight back to Orlando. I have about an hour before boarding the plane so I decided to take a walk around the terminal to get a little exercise and stretch my legs. As I was walking I noticed a little book store.

Since I am such a sucker for books (I actually have to put myself on a book budget as I could become book poor very quickly) I walked into the store telling myself I would just browse while I wait for my flight.

As I walked around, the book rack below was directly in my path. At first I did not pay any attention to the rack, but then something caught my eye. There was a mini-series from HBR press on emotional intelligence. I am a bit shocked that the shelf is relatively full with  titles such as What Makes An Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, and the HBR business classic, Managing Oneself, based on the HBR best selling article.

The one title that is not full is the little book in the HBR series on emotional intelligence called Happiness.

Could it be that leaders are clamoring to figure out what it means to be happy? Could it be that they are wondering things like “What am I really doing with my life? What meaning or purpose am I deriving from my work?”  

Questions like these are profound and impactful, yet they are not often thought about by those in leadership.

Perhaps one of the reasons the book shelf I ran into only had one copy of the book on happiness is because leaders are starting to become more curious about what happiness really means for them.

Something For You To Think About

According to Revue Bar-On, the father of the most popular model for trait emotional intelligence, one of the factors that impacts our ability as humans to be happy is our interpersonal relationships. 

It goes without saying that leadership cannot exist without strong relationships.

A leader who has mutually satisfying relationships is able to get things done with other people by establishing trust and gaining commitments.  The ability to maintain a strong rapport with others is both motivating and inspirational, which allows others to work hard and maintain a desire to meet challenging goals. 

Leaders who are effective have an ability to maintain mutually satisfying relationships in both good times and not so good times. 

The best leaders I observe have an ability to build these relationships with all kinds of people, even the most difficult. Regardless of how the leader feels personally about the person, really effective leaders are able to put differences aside and navigate the political landscape of any organization.

Great leaders can navigate any relational complexity to get things done.

How are you doing?

The leadership question I’d like you to reflect on this week is how are your interpersonal relationships?

Are your relationships allowing you to maximize your happiness, or are they holding you back?

Are your relationships mutually satisfying, meaning those you are in contact with feel they get as much out of the relationship as you do?

I want to affirm you as a leader today. Go out there and build the relationships you need to lead.

How to Create Excitement In Hiring

I had a quick meeting with a very good friend of mine the other day and the upbeat tone my friend shared really made me stop and think. I was inspired to write down what I was observing and I’m wondering if perhaps you might feel the same way I did by the end of this post.

I saw my friend at the end of a very long day for both of us. I asked a quite boring question, “How did your day go today? Did you do anything interesting?”

Her response was so enthusiastic it actually took me back a bit!

I knew she had delivered an important presentation to her leadership team because she had talked about it the day before. 

“So the presentation must have gone really well,” I said. 

“Oh, the presentation…” there was some hesitation in her voice. “Sure, it went just fine,” she said, but that was almost 9 hours ago! I’m excited because I just got out of the most amazing interview with a candidate we are thinking about hiring. I was asked to sit in on the interview sort of at the last minute so I did not even get the person’s resume beforehand. I was feeling a bit unprepared, and frankly, it was the end of the day and I was feeling a bit tired.”

“Well that doesn’t sound all that exciting,” I interrupted.

“But it was!” she said. “When the young lady walked into the room she had such an air of confidence about her. She stepped right up, shook my hand, and presented me with a copy of her resume. During the next hour she talked about her education and her experiences, which were an exact match for what we needed.”

Then, my friend said those magic words that I love to hear when a leader is making a hiring decision…

“My only regret is that I know she won’t be in the position long. She is just too good! People will quickly see in her what I see and within 18 months she will be promoted!”

I know what my friend is talking about when she says regret.

Not the kind of feeling you get when your dinner companion orders something off the menu that turns out to be way better than what you ordered. 

This kind of regret is a result of knowing that the person will do so well in the role will not have the opportunity to work with them long enough to learn what you could from them. 

I do hope as you read this post you are thinking of a particular person you have hired in the past that has moved on to a higher level. Organizations are like that sometimes. They take away from us some of the best relationships we have ever had and it seems like things will never be the same.

I have two folks in mind that I have worked with over the years and I am going to jump on LinkedIn later today to send them each a message and tell them what a joy it was to work with them.

How about you? Maybe simply sending a note to someone will make their day!

I am so happy for my friend as she hires a person she is so excited about. Is it possible that is really the standard we need to shoot for in hiring?

There are likely many people who can do a job, but if you are hope to form a high performing team, maybe there is more to it than just a competent person. That connection where you know they are the exact right person for the job ought to be considered as well.

For those of us who do some hiring but also have other career aspirations, what do we need to do to be that person who creates such excitement?

If you have thoughts on that, I would love to hear from you!

Focus on BOTH Performance AND Mastery: A Development Suggestion for Leaders

It happened to me again.

I cannot believe it caught me off guard, but it did…again.

A student I have been teaching in an executive coaching program asked for some time to talk with me. This student has been doing quite well in the course, but wanted to discuss an issue they were facing.

Usually when this happens the student has one of two types of concerns.

The first is that the work they are doing is not up to expectation and they want to know what to do about it.

The second is that they have told people they are in this coaching program and have received an inquiry about doing some work for a potential client.

This call was not one of the usual scenarios, and so it caught me a bit off guard.

“Dr. Livingston, I have never been a CEO or even led a team of more than five people. Why would anyone ever hire me as an executive coach? I have been doing very well in all my coursework and I really understand the concepts and the value that executive coaching can bring to an organization. However, I just do not feel qualified to do coaching at an executive level.”

I Am Curious

Have you ever received this type of question from folks in your organization?

It might not sound exactly the same, but the more I think about it the more prevalent I believe it is.

The basic root of the question is this:

“I am here and performed really well, and now I want to be there; how do I do it?”

Some examples I have heard recently from clients I work with might be helpful:

1. "I am in sales and have performed really well, what do I need to do to get promoted?”

2. "I am a high performing charge nursel, what do I need to do to become a supervisor?”

3. "I am a youth minister and performed really well, what do I need to do to get my own church?”

4. “I am a production manager and performed really well, what do I need to do to become a plant manager?”

As I am listening to my student, it occurs to me that my clients have been talking about some very similar types of issues. What does a leader do when someone is performing really well and they deserve other opportunities in the organization?

I have found over the years that telling someone to just “keep up the good work” and good things will happen is both lame on my end and not very helpful to them.

Before I give a suggestion on how to work with someone who presents to you in this manner, I think there are some important assumptions to put on the table:

• The person really has performed really well. If they have not, then they need to hear this from you and to get your thoughts on how they can improve performance.

• There is opportunity to move the person now or in the future. If there is a new opportunity for them, then it is up to you to get them there and set them up for success.

• The individual not only displays appropriate performance at the current role, but they have the necessary leadership ability to be successful at the next level. My preference here is that they have a perceived ability to perform two levels higher than their current level.

If all of these assumptions are true and the person is ready and deserving for new leadership opportunities, how will you help them focus on their development?

A Simple Suggestion

One thing that has helped me is to get them to focus on the idea of mastery in addition to performance.

Those who have a performance orientation tend to focus on that what is good enough to compete with others as the goal. In our society, performance is indicative of very short term thinking and the result can be either positive or negative. You are either better than others at what you do, which feels satisfying, or you are not, which feels discouraging.

Alternately, those with a mastery orientation take a longer term view of development. Learning, rather than competence, becomes the goal. Those with a mastery orientation focus on what is possible in their development. They think more about what they don’t know rather than showing others what they do know. A mastery development focus takes the person on a journey through their chosen field rather than to a destination of any particular organizational role.

Give It A Try

How can you help someone in your organization change the focus of their development from performance to mastery?

Notice I am not saying here to not focus on performance. Ensuring the person stays on task and accomplishes the goals is still important. Do not lose sight of  performance excellence.

The intention is to shift the thinking and the focus a bit from being competent to becoming an expert in their field.

What could they learn that they do not already know?

How could they innovate their current role?

Is there anything they could experiment with to try something a little different?

Having a mastery mindset often means asking an entirely different set of questions than those that are merely focused on performance.

If you give this a try with some folks on your team, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a comment below or send me an email. I am really interested in what this distinction looks like in your world.

5 Actions For Speaking Truth to Power

Every leader needs a voice who will speak truth and help them see things that are not obvious. Henry Kissinger is famous for saying that one of the most difficult things for a young leader to do is to “speak truth to power;” to go up the power gradient with information that is contrary to what the hierarchical, authoritative, and referent, position believes to be true. We have all been there at points and felt the emotion of that moment. There is inherent organizational danger in communicating things to a leader that they are not seeing in the moment:

• You could be rejected which leads to embarrassment

• You could be dismissed which leads to self-doubt

• You could be humiliated which leads to isolation

• You could be discounted which leads to demoralization

The young leader has information that someone in a decision-making position needs to hear, and is frozen in the moment by these potentially negative outcomes.

The other side of the proposition is, all things being equal, there is a huge upside in communicating to a leader what they are not seeing in the moment:

• You could be celebrated for the input

• You could be included in the decision-making process

• You could be honored for your courage

• You could be valued for your contribution

Whether a part of reality or a figment of our imagination as a young leader “speaking truth to power” can seem overwhelming. This is the risk tension that the young leader faces. Some of the mediators that go into the “speak truth to power" equation are:

• Culture of the organization-What is the level of freedom that truly exists for information sharing?

• Young leaders' personal-risk tolerance-Where do they fall on a spectrum between “wary” and “adventurous”?

• Receptivity of the leader to feedback-What is the historical behavior elicited when contrary opinions have been shared?

RECEPTIVITY OF THE LEADER

I think we can all pretty easily agree that the young leader when faced with a decision to speak truth to power, has a burden that can feel like wearing a shirt made of lead.

However, as more senior leaders in organizations, how much of the burden falls on us to create an atmosphere where much of the risk is mediated for a young leader? How much of the responsibility is ours to create the environment in which others feel a freedom to be able to share?

I argue that much of the speaking-truth-to-power-dichotomy rests not in the hands of the deliverer but the receiver. And yet the senior leader is the one who often times has the most to lose by missing key information that was never brought to them. In the fast-paced, get it done now, microwave culture that organizations exist in today many of us cave into our survival reptilian brain that tells us to do whatever we can to survive.

Many times these environmental and personal factors are not acting in our favor. As leaders, we have to put effort into creating a persona and a culture so that the voice we need to be able to hear in our organization comes through.

5 ACTIONS YOU CAN WORK ON TODAY

Here are my top 5 tips for leaders who want to improve their chances of hearing all the information they need to hear to be able to make an informed decision:

• Slow down your cadence-Most of the leadership mistakes I have made were because my world was moving fast and I did not slow down to see more possibilities. The faster I went, the more convinced I became that I was right, and the further away I got from the truth. Take a deep breath, count to 10, silently sing a familiar tune very slowly (I like; “Row, row, row, your boat), pray, do whatever you need to do to slow your reality down.

• Become curious-The practice is to suspend your need to be right or heard and to work really hard to understand the other person's position. Before you jump to conclusion or shoot them down because of what you know that they don’t, spend some time to really discern the message they are bringing to you.

• Always say thank you-So before it feels like I am your mom or kindergarten teacher, just hear me out. You would be surprised at how often I observe leaders in interactions where they turn and walk away without expressing gratitude. I don’t think it is an intent to be mean or degrading, the pressure of the moment takes the brain to the next thing rather than finishing the relationship with the current interaction. Researchers at USC found that simple acts of gratitude provide benefits ranging from feelings of reward and satisfaction to just helping people to hold on to their humanity.

• Spend time reflecting- At the end of your day take the time to review the day. Play back the interactions you had with others. Resist the temptation to become defensive and ask yourself questions like:  I wonder what they were really trying to ask me?  Why did I feel such a strong need to defend myself?  Why did I feel such a strong need to exert power in the moment?  What unintended consequences could the action I took cause?

• Do the inner work of developing your soul- The psychology data says you are as intelligent right now as you will ever be. Your personality is fully formed, so you know if you are extroverted or introverted. You have most of the skill you will ever need. So what is your next step in development? Do you need to work on developing the soul of your leadership?

HOMEWORK:

Pick one of the 5 Actions above and work on it every day for a week. For example, in every personal interaction and every email you send, say “thank you." Work on making your attitude heartfelt and not rote. If you try any of these let me know how they go for you, I would love to hear.