A Strategic Piece of Advice for When You Receive Critical Feedback

One of the most difficult things any of us can experience in our organizational life is to receive critical feedback.

So often we speak as if like feedback, we value feedback, we even welcome feedback.  I worked with a client a number of years ago who’s mantra was "We are a feedback-rich environment!"

But let's be honest, most of the time this desire for feedback is because we want validation that things are going really well. 

Do we have the same reactions however when the feedback we receive is more critical? Is there a best way to respond when you are given feedback that your performance is not up to standard or that your behaviors are not valued by others?

Misaligned Expectations

I had a client call me a few weeks ago and he was audibly frustrated when I answered the phone. We really didn’t even exchange any pleasantries like, "How are you doing?" to start our conversation.  He just dug right in…

“Scott, you would not believe my boss and what she just did! We have been working really hard all year to deliver on a really important project for one of our top internal customers.  The project has gone well overall, the client has been very pleased and there have been zero complaints, and we are even under budget. When I sat down to review the project as part of my performance review, my boss acknowledged my hard work and then said I would be getting an average performance rating. Average! I can tell you my performance was anything but average!”

 He said that he just sat there just stunned and ask himself, "How could anything on the project went any better? Average performance? What do you have to do to get a top performance recognition around here?”

He told me that he was so emotional that he couldn’t even hear anything else his boss was saying to him. All he wanted to know was WHY she felt this way. Was she paying attention at all? 

Receiving Feedback that Feels Critical

I think there are times in our corporate lives when we receive critical feedback that is not intended to be harmful but it sure feels like it is to us.  

I said to the young man on the phone, “It sounds to me like what your boss is saying is that your performance is like that of most people in the organization and that means that it is good enough that they want you to stick around for the near future.”

That went over like a ton of bricks.

“Scott, you have no idea how hard I worked, how many hours, what we did to make that project happen on time and under budget.”

“I am sure I don’t understand the details, but I am wondering if you are hearing the message your boss is trying to send. She is saying well done, but since you are expecting to hear 'excellent,' and you are not, what you are hearing is 'bad.'”   

Then I said, “Are you sure her message to you is BAD?”

I don’t think he heard my question because he was still so fired up that he said to me, “All I want to know is WHY she feels this way."

“That may be the wrong question,” I said,  “I think what you want to really know is HOW you could do better next time to get the rating you are expecting."

When we get feedback that feels critical in nature, our natural urge is to defend ourselves. We can’t help it, it is part of our hard-wiring. The goal as you work to develop yourself as a leader is to overcome these natural defense mechanisms and develop new response mechanisms so that you can learn and grow.

Your Experience

Have you ever experienced this? I mean, worked really hard on something, poured your life into it, thought you were doing really well, and then suddenly you are confronted with the feeling that what you are doing isn’t really good enough?

If you have been in an organization long enough you no doubt have experienced this type of misaligned expectation or critical feedback. The feedback may not be critical in the sense that it is mean or demeaning, just that what you are doing or working on has some room for improvement.

Strategic Advice

Here is what I want to encourage you to do when you feel like you are receiving Critical Feedback.

1. Step back and try and not take the criticism personally.

2. Take a deep breath and let go of the negative, defensive feeling.

3. Change your WHY to HOW. Focus on what your improvement needs to be rather than have your boss defend their position.

In the end, your supervisor feels how they feel, and there is probably little you can do in the moment to change his/her mind. The question is less about WHY they feel the way they do and more about WHAT you need to do differently and HOW you can make changes for the future.

A Vaccination for Leadership Failure

Who wants to fail as a leader? No one.

None of us wakes up in the morning and says, “Let me see how I can totally screw up the thing I am working on today."

And yet…Here is my story.

4 Things to Look for in Wise Counsel (2)

A number of years ago, I had been a fairly successful sales professional and tapped for a management development program. The company I worked for was growing like crazy. Most people spent less than 2 years in this program before they were tapped for their first management level job. I thought I had arrived! Look at me! Watch me climb! Nothing will stop my career! These were all thoughts I had at the time. I was on top of the world and it felt great.

My wife and I moved from my sales territory in Decatur, Illinois to the corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our family consisted of my wife and I along with our 2-year-old son Zach, and a precious baby girl due in about 6 weeks. The plan was to be in Indianapolis for less than 2 years before our next move into my first management level job. So, I did what every person with a dream, a wife, and 2 young kids does….

I went out and bought a 2 seat sports car.

I rationalized it by telling myself, "Hey, we already own a minivan. No problem."

Fast forward 5 years later. That's right, my 2-year window for promotion had gone to 5! The company hit a tight spot. No one got promoted for 3 years beyond my 2-year window. And on top of the career slow down, my wife and I had another baby boy! We were now a family of 5, with a minivan and a second car that is a Mazda Rx 7.

Great car, yet totally not practical when my wife took the minivan to go shopping one Saturday and left me with the 3 kids and a couple of friends kids. Scott and 5 kids on a Saturday morning, normally not a problem, until Zach comes out holding his hand over his eye and blood dripping down having just been whacked on the head with a toy by one of the other kids.

Question: How do I get 5 kids and me in the Rx7 and to the hospital to get Zach stitched up?

The Lesson

There is an ancient Proverb that says “Before his downfall a man's heart is proud."

I will admit it. I was full of pride. Proud of my career. Proud of my family. Proud of how I had achieved.

What is the problem with pride? It blocks your vision of reality. As leaders, we puff ourselves up for everyone to see.

What are some things that feed our pride as leaders?

1. People come to you for decision making.

2. People look to you for safety (job security).

3. People look to you as an expert in your field.

4. People feel comfortable knowing you are there.

5. You make people feel they are important.

6. You give people a feeling of optimism.

7. You give people a sense of hope.

8. You are near the top of the food chain.

9. People seek your advice and counsel.

10. Your opinions are sought and considered.

The great writer CS Lewis says that the problem with your pride is that it is in competition with everyone else's pride. Pride at its very root is competitive. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man,” according to Lewis.

More money. Bigger house. Better looking. Smarter. Prettier wife. More loving husband. Most successful kids. Harder worker. Coolest job.

The problem with pride is not the metric, but what we do with it. It is in our nature to compare. It is how we know where we are. The problem with pride is an inability to be content and a desire for control. It is a scarcity mentality that says “for me to be up in life, you must be down.”

This is a lie.

Great leaders find ways for everyone to be up.

What I have learned over the years is that when I begin feeling like this, full of pride, I better watch my next step.

The Vaccination

When things go wrong, we begin to think about treatment. Treatment is about fixing the problem. Vaccination, however, is about prevention.

Treatment in the medical world is meant to help you recover from something that has happened to you. A vaccination is meant to prevent the disease in the first place.

The second part of the Proverb I mentioned above states, “but humility comes before honor."

Being humble. Putting others ahead of your pride. Being modest in your opinion of yourself. Thinking of others as better than yourself is one way to overcome pride.

The question I have been asking myself is, are there any strategies for preventing pride in the first place?

How can you vaccinate yourself against pride that often accompanies Leadership?

Here is a shot in the arm that can help you prevent Leadership Pride. This might sting a little, but here comes the needle...

Seek Wise Counsel.

That didn’t hurt too bad, did it?

Looking back on my story, I really should have sought wise counsel about buying that car. Not only was it impractical, but the assumptions I used to frame my reality regarding my career and my family were askew. They just were not based in reality. Just because the business was in an up cycle didn’t mean it was going to stay that way forever. Some wise counsel at that time could have been just the vaccination the doctor would have prescribed to prevent me from making such a poor decision.

There is another Proverb that says “Without counsel plans are frustrated, but with many counselors, plans succeed."

As you are thinking about getting wise counsel in your life, what should you look for? Here are a few things I have found as I have researched the topic:

4 Things to Look for in Wise Counsel:

1. Experience. Why not ask someone who has been down the road what the path looks like?

2. Impulse Control. Look for someone who is not going to be swayed by your emotional rationale. You do not want someone who will agree with you all the time. You want another perspective on what reality looks like. A person who is patient enough to hear you out.

3. Courage. Having an ability to disagree with you is paramount to you being able to learn and grow.

4. Empathy. Someone who can see your perspective even if they do not agree. Empathy differs from sympathy in that the empathic person will ask the hard question when it is in your best interest. The sympathetic person will just agree with you in whatever state you are in.

So often in leader development, we screw up and look for a treatment remedy for what has happened. Why not look to prevent these potential failures in leadership by vaccinating yourself against tragedy? Seeking wise counsel may be one good shot in the arm for you as a leader.

Homework

Look for a leadership decision you have coming up. Seek out some wise counsel. Lay the topic out for those you are seeking input from, without bias or telling them your preferences. Consider what they say to you before you act.

2 Minute Read to Improve Your 2020 Vision

When I was a kid my mom would tell me I needed to eat more carrots to improve my vision. If I wanted to be able to see with clarity, her wisdom of the time was for me to crunch on a few orange root sticks. Mom’s advice, while heartfelt and well meaning, did not ultimately keep me from becoming farsighted and needing sight correction to be able to see clearly.

Many of us will get well meaning advice as we approach the new year, reading and listening to experts drone on and on about goal setting and how you must have a goal if you want to accomplish anything.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with setting a goal, it can be a bit meaningless if not aligned with the vision of who you want to be as a leader. 

Envision Your Future You As A Leader

As the calendar changes from 2019 many of us will  begin tithing about what we want to accomplish in 2020. Most of us will make some kind of resolution to make a change as the new year rolls in.

A resolution is “a firm decision to do or not do something”.

Like you, In the past I have made many types of New Year’s Resolutions:

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

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

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

• Spiritual: Read through the Bible in a year

All good stuff. I am sure many of you are making resolutions and talking with your friends and family about them over the next few days.

I thought I might challenge you to add a category this year. In addition to your personal, professional, family, and spiritual resolutions, think about a resolution to improve your leadership. Envision yourself becoming  the leader you want to be in the future.

Leadership

Here are 10 Ideas to get your thinking started on what you could resolve to do or not do in 2020 when it comes to your leadership.  I pulled this list from some of our more popular blog posts we have done over the years.

1. Reflect on being a great leader and what is keeping you from being great.  Who among us doesn’t want to be seen as a great leader? And yet, so many of us have some barrier that we just don’t want to see or do anything about. 

2. Work on your values before your vision.

3. Spend less time working and more time thinking. This idea runs counter culture to our “doing” mentality. Perhaps you need to work less and think more to enhance your ability to lead. 

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

5. Who in your organization do you need to network with. 

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

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

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

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

10. Whatever change you make, put a plan in place to sustain it and get some coaching to keep you accountable.

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

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

Blessings to you and your families.

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

Give Me 1 More Week and I Will Improve Your Stress Resilience - Making Stress Your Friend

Since this post will hit your inbox a day or two prior to Christmas, I am going to keep it relatively short.

Over the last few weeks I have been working through a series on describing the habits I have noticed over the years of stress resilient people. You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them and yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you’d like to catch up or review the previous posts, you can find them by clicking here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth, I will give you the first 4 steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

1. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, to carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them.  But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

2.  The the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress resilience is they have an ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative.

3. The fourth thing that I have noticed about people who are resilient in times of stress and ambiguity is that they can answer one key question for themselves. The question is this: “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  Our focus as leaders needs to be on the kinds of things that will actually help me instead of making my “stress hole” even bigger.

My perspective

The final post in this series is the most important of all. The reason is, for example, you can do your best to ask yourself, “is what I am doing helping or harming me?” which is the fourth suggestion I made to improve your stress resilience. And indeed, if you focus on this question, your resilience to stress should improve. 

However, what I have observed is people who ask themselves the question, “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” will work really hard to convince themselves that the harm they are actually doing to themselves is not really hurting them. 

This is why human connection is so important in creating stress resilience. In one of the most impactful studies I have reviewed on the subject of stress resilience actually has to do with living longer. Poulin, Brown Dillard Smith (2013) out of the University of Buffalo monitored participant mortality and time to death for 5 years by way of newspaper obituaries and monthly state death-record tapes.

Mortality revealed a significant interaction between helping behavior and stressful events. 

Specifically, stress did not predict mortality risk among individuals who provided help to others in the past year, but stress did predict mortality among those who did not provide help to others. 

Bottom line is, creating human connection and helping others can help you live longer.

And not just creating human connection, but when you do, listen to those who you connect with. 

Story

My wife and I were back home in Peoria, Illinois this past weekend to celebrate Christmas with my mom. It was a really nice weekend connecting with mom and my siblings. We spent the afternoon together on both Saturday and Sunday. At the end of our time together on Sunday, my wife and I went to a Christmas show at one of the local churches in town. ‘

When we went into the church the weather was a bit cold and the sky was overcast.  About 2 hours later when we came out of the show, there was about 2.5 inches of snow on the ground and near blizzard driving conditions. It took us quite a while to get out of the church parking lot, and once we got on the main roads they were snow packed and very slippery to drive on. 

I have been driving on snow and ice since I was 14 years old in my dad’s old pickup truck, usually in a parking lot somewhere just to get some practice. So, I know how to drive in pretty treacherous conditions.

However, about 7 years ago my wife and I got out of the midwest snow belt, and moved ourselves to sunny Florida.  Not much snow to drive through in the Sunshine state! 

Needless to say I was a bit nervous driving, not as much for me, but as we made our way back to where we were staying there were cars all over in ditches. The result, no doubt, of forgetting the important rules of driving on snow and ice. My nerves had more to do with not knowing the skill level of other people driving then knowing myself what to do and not do. 

It was all a bit stressful, to say the least.

I was really glad I had my wife along with me because her human connection really made me want to make stress my friend and listen to what my body was telling me. Having Kim in the passenger seat next to me heightened my own sense of self-awareness and self-preservation. 

I could feel the stress with every quarter-mile that we drove. Sometimes the back end of the car sliding, sometimes the front wheels just not get anyone traction on the wet surface. Feeling the stress and embracing it helped me in the moment to realize this was not a time for heroics. Not at all a time to “see how fast the car could go” or “how close could I get to the car in front of me.” My stress was actually my friend in that it was telling me to keep a safe distance from other vehicles. 

I also really tried to listen to my wife as she became my copilot, searching for the best route for us to take and making sure I was still on a drivable road surface.  I think so many times we get into stressful situations and our knee jerk reaction is to just bear down and do it all ourselves. This is a time, when you are making stress your friend, to really listen to others.

This listening can really help you answer the question “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” If I am willing to listen to others input then I am less likely to make a mistake; convincing myself that something that is really destined to harm me will help me.

My Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Stress Resilience

In summary here are my top 5 ways for you to improve your stress resilience

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. 

1.  Choose where to focus your attention.

2.  Find the good in the circumstance or the people. 

3. Ask Yourself; “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  

4. Make Stress Your Friend

Now go out there and have a stress free Christmas and a very happy new year!

Give Me 3 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress-Resilience: Find the Good

Over the last few weeks, I have been working through a blog series on describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you missed them, you can find the first two posts in the series here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth I will just give you the first steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine, per se. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

2. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

These two posts lead me to the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress-resilience;

They have the ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative. Before we unpack this, let’s go over some data on the topic just to cement the need.

Coping Successfully With Stressful Life Events

There is a really good chance, even if you are someone who is fairly stress-resilient, that as you are reading this, the person on your right AND the person on your left is not so good.

A recent (2013) survey of adults and teens commissioned by the American Psychological Association showed 65% of people said managing their stress is very or extremely important (I found this a little lower than I would have thought), but just 38% said they do at least a good job of managing stressful situations.

So, we as humans think something is important and we recognize we are not very good at it. And for way too many of us, that is where the story ends. But not for people who are more stress-resilient. And it turns out that for most of us, it can be a simple shift in perspective.

Lets examine the most prevalent emotion people experience in stressful situations…Anxiety.

There is data to suggest that 1 in 5 Americans will suffer from a diagnosed anxiety disorder in a given year. Anxiety is the most prevalent emotional stress response.

A common definition of Anxiety is "…facing an uncertain threat.” We see something in our future, either real or perceived, that we don’t know or understand as going to do us harm. A situation or a context like this will cause us to feel anxious.

Our anxious feeling is telling us something about our uncertainty in the situation and often gets compounded by other negative thoughts or emotions until we get ourselves so worked up that we can not even remember what the root cause of our anxiety really is.

A Personal Story

Let’s play with this definition for anxiety a bit and see if we can build some stress-resilient muscle in the process.

I’ll offer up a personal story as a frame for our learning.

This time of year always creates a bit of an anxious time for me as a solopreneur. Many of the coaching and training engagements that have been running in 2019 will be coming to an end. Many of my clients are changing approaches in how they are using services like the ones I offer.

I can become anxious about where my business is going to come from in 2020.

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition of anxiety).

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition of anxiety).

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer.

Being Stress Resilient

People who are stress-resilient have adaptive resources in both cognitive and emotional arenas to be able to handle the story they are perceiving.

One of the most important adaptive strategies is to find the good in the situation.

I know what you might be saying because I have said it myself…”What could possibly be good about losing clients or business in 2020?” Frankly NOTHING! But we are not working at the right level to deal with the anxiety. There is nothing good about losing business, feeling rejected, or having to experience lean times in business. Please hear me; I am not one of those Pollyanna overly optimistic leader development guys. You know the type, they just don’t seem to live in the same world as I do when it comes to being anxious about losing something important.

What I am advocating for here is letting go of the outcome.

Since what I am projecting in my stressful and anxious situation has not happened yet, there is time for me to do something about it. In essence, I need to Find the Good in the inputs that will ultimately drive the outcome.

Focus on Quality Inputs

If I can let go of the outcome, just for a moment, that is causing my anxious feeling and focus on Finding the Good in the inputs, will this lessen or eliminate my anxiety?

That becomes the central question for people who have the ability to be resilient.

What I am going to do is to Find the Good in the 5 elements of my short story above and see if I feel less anxious. Here they are repeated with a reframing of each of them to find the good:

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me. This business has never been about me. It is about the clients I serve and the good we do for them. Part of my work here is to get the story off of me and to focus on those I serve. In doing so, my needs, whatever they are, will be met.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition for anxiety). Business is complex, it is not uncertain. Now more than ever in recorded history organizations need leadership development. My clients are good people who can use my objective perspective on developing leaders in their organizations.

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition for anxiety). The threatening tone I am picking up is one of perceived loss. That this loss will mean a loss of income, so I won’t be able to meet the needs of my business. I may have to close my operation and do something else that I don’t love near as much. I hope you see in this how a threat can cycle down into a negative vortex of things that are so far from being real at the moment. But this vortex of fear can become paralyzing, and none of it is real. The good in the story is for me to get excited about some of the plans I have for 2020, rather than how I can make my reality less horrible than I am seeing it. I want to be excited about the opportunities I have and not just see how I can squeak by.

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling. Coming to an end feels like such a threat. While I do have some engagements that are ending; 75% of my business comes from existing clients. So that I may have individual clients that will rotate off my schedule, but that does not mean that my relationship with the organization has to end. The good in this is that nothing is ending, it is just an opportunity to start over and learn something new.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer. My clients are changing. Fact. But this does not mean they no longer need a service like the one I provide. Change doesn’t have to be a threat. It can be a golden opportunity. I need to become curious about what life is like for them and find additional ways to partner with them using the services I provide.

So, there you have a nice little reframing exercise.

Step 1. Don’t focus on the outcome

Step 2. Focus on the quality of your inputs by finding the good in your story.

Spend some time with this little exercise. If you are feeling anxious about something, write it down. Then find the inputs and turn them from negative toward the good. See if this helps you become less anxious about your situation.

I love feedback, so if you try this I would love to hear your story.

Give Me 4 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress Resilience

Last week I began a series describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types - it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure.

To recap, the first step in improving your stress resilience is:

Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is to carefully choose where to focus your attention in times of adversity. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But, we can get so wrapped up in the little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the lesson.

Last week I wrote about losing one of my biggest clients, quite unexpectedly, and really through no fault of my own. I had been teaching for years in their company’s management development program. I would do some work with emerging leaders; helping them define their leadership principles as well as teaching other leaders the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. I did this work for over 7 years and got great reviews every time we did a class. Then, I got a phone call that the company was reorganizing and they were not sure how they would be approaching training in the future.

So in one phone call, I lost one of my biggest and best clients. At least, I lost that opportunity with the client in a very ambiguous sort of way.

According to Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss, “People hunger for certainty.” We all like stability and to know, or at least to have the idea that we know, what is going to happen in the future. So, according to Boss, “…uncertainty makes ambiguous loss the most distressful of all losses…” This is because the loss is often very confusing. People can actually become immobilized by not being able to make sense of the situation. In my case, it was tough, because I always held a belief that if you did a great job for a customer, work would always follow. And while I think the basic tenant is true, there are just things that happen in business that are not in my control.

Second, the ambiguous loss felt very much to me like it was irrational. How could they no longer love me? How could such a great company no longer invest in leaders? As I thought about all of this, my mind became fixated on the loss. So much so I was starting to get physically exhausted. By focusing on the wrong part of the loss, I was losing my perspective.

My Intervention

I was telling this story to my coach during one of my monthly sessions with him. After our session, as I am prone to do, I sat and summarized the coaching in a journal I keep. Here is my entry:

-Don’t lose what you have to what you lost!

-What do I need to be learning through all of this?

At the same time this loss was happening to me, I was teaching a group of doctoral students at Indiana Wesleyan University.. I had been reviewing an article by Lila Davachi, Tobias Kiefer, David Rock, and Lisa Rock titled Learning that lasts through the AGES.

AGES is a 4 part acronym:

• Attention is critical.

• Generating insights takes time.

• Emotions govern.

• Spaced learning sticks.

Here is what I learned from each part of the AGES Model during my stressful time:

Attention is critical and I needed to focus on the customers I am still able to serve. Just because I lost this one thing should not affect how I serve those I am still blessed to work with.

Generating insights takes time. I have a tendency to want to rush things. If I am going to learn from this loss, I needed to give myself some space and realize that time does have a healing component to it.

Emotions govern and I get to choose how I feel. Sure, I was going to miss these great folks I had worked with and to some degree, I mourned the loss. And I am also joyful that I have other clients and in fact, I have been able to keep relationships with many folks at this company. So it turns out I really didn’t lose them, the work there just changed for me and looks very different.

Spaced learning sticks. I needed to process this learning over time and in chunks. You can not learn everything you need to learn all at once. Spacing things out, keeping them fresh in your journal, will really help you maximize your learning.

Summary Thought

For those of you wanting to improve your stress resilience, one of the most important points is to carefully choose what you will focus your attention on. You get to pick. You can focus on the pain and stay there. You can focus on how you were treated and dwell.

Or

You can appropriately accept and mourn your loss, and then focus on all the good things you still have.

Choose wisely.

That last thought actually will be the focus of next week’s post…Appreciate the good.

See you next week!

The Secret for Being Stress Resilient | Part 1: Getting A Grip

Spoiler Alert.

Over the next 5 weeks, I will be writing on the idea of becoming more Stress Resilient. I thought going deep on one particular topic might be kind fo fun, so let me know what you think about the series format! I hope you enjoy it, but if not, I’d love to know that as well.

So many of the clients I am working with these days are undergoing very fundamental changes in their business models. How they used to do things even two years ago are being drastically altered by changing customer demands or big shifts in market dynamics.

One of the things I have noticed when changes like this occur is the desire people have to go back to the way things “used to be.”

There is something innately comforting for us all in the known, even when the known is not our most desirable state.

Many years ago, I used to get on an airplane and fly across the country to teach a one day class in a management development program. I really loved the experience and developed many great relationships along the journey. The travel was hard. Exhausting even. But there was real comfort for me in getting on a plane on a Tuesday, flying all day. Then teaching all day on Wednesday. Spending the night in a hotel and flying home on Thursday. This work ended up taking 3 days for one day of actual work. And I loved it! No matter how hard it was, or how tired I got, I loved the work.

My wife would often say things like, “Why do you do that to yourself? Why don’t you find a client who is local so you don’t have to spend 2 days on an airplane for one day of work?”

Sometimes the truth really hurts.

Did I listen? Heck NO! I kept getting on the airplane. I loved this client. My wife could tell, so much so that from time to time she would suggest we move to California.

Then all of a sudden, it was all gone. The company reorganized how they were doing their training and the work I loved was no more.

All of that comfort was gone. All of those great relationships vanishing into thin air. All the fantastic people I was able to interact with and learn from…poof. No more.

All of this happened over the course of a single month.

Lesson 1

After I got off the phone with my client who explained to me that they were moving in a different direction with how they were going to train leaders my initial reaction was, “Oh no! Now what am I going to do?” I think this is pretty typical for us as humans during times of change or ambiguous types of loss to get self-referential and concerned for our own well being.

I can remember not knowing what to do exactly. I had an appointment with my coach the next day and planned to talk it through with him at that time. So, in the meantime, I did something that made me feel good, I went and worked out. I thought a good cardiovascular workout to the point of exhaustion was just what I needed to clear my head and think about what my options really were at the time.

I made it to the gym and got on the treadmill and my trainer Thomas said this to our group: “This is going to be a rough 23 minutes on the treadmills today. You are going to have increases in the incline of the treadmill every 2 minutes. I want you to start running at a push pace and maintain that pace as long as you can as you ascend.”

Then the gold came out of Thomas’s mouth, “This is not going to be easy, but as the climb continues I want you to envision: Your Future You!”

That is exactly what I needed to hear. I finished my workout and when I got home I went straight to my journal and wrote:

Adversity doesn’t discriminate. It happens to all of us as humans. It is really part of the human condition. I need to better understand that shit happens. I don’t want it to happen but it does.

Then I started to do something that I work with my coaching clients all the time - I reframed the adversity.

I started with “why not me?”

Look, I had a really good ride with that client. Almost 10 years and we really had a fantastic relationship. It was really awesome. Now they are doing things differently, and so I need to do things differently as a result.

WHY NOT ME?

This is exactly what needed to happen in order for me to start doing some things I had wanted to do all along.

The climb is not going to be easy (now my trainer Thomas is in my head), and I need to start to design my Future Me!

How about You?

Are things changing really quickly around you? I guess you can just sit there and take it and let the chips fall where they might, randomly without much of your input. You could bury your head in the sand and hope that the change that is happening doesn’t see you and just passes you buy.

Or, you can sit down and start to design your future you.

I wonder when you get to your future what your future you will say to your past you who decided to take the bull by the horns and create its destiny?

The other thing I would like to add is just a thought for all of you who are leading others through times of change and ambiguity.

And that is, in order to reduce stress, an important leadership challenge is to reduce follower uncertainty. Part of your job is to make the change as transparent as you possibly can. Even if you have to say you don’t know, be authentic and do your best. People still need a feeling of security, even when you don’t have the answers.

I believe that in a dynamic environment, leaders can reduce this uncertainty by continually communicating and reinforcing five key questions for the organization: who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it, where we are going, and how we are going to get there. Answering these questions for followers can tap into some basic needs that influence human behavior.

If you don’t know what to say, then maybe just articulating some answers to these questions might be helpful.

5 Steps Toward Sustainable Change

This is a very busy time of year for many of us.  In the U.S. we are celebrating Thanksgiving this week, which means the ever-looming Christmas craziness is just around the corner.

For many of you, that can only mean one thing...

It is performance review time.

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

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

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

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

I think when most of us get this kind of feedback, it makes us a little defensive, so for now, I want you to proactively be thinking about what it is that you need to change to get that top performance ranking next year. 

Maybe you need to add a skill to your toolbox. Maybe you need to be more assertive with your peers or show a little more empathy with your direct reports. Whatever the case, for most of you the problem isn’t finding what it is you need to change, the question is how to sustain the change you want to make.

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

5 Steps Toward Sustainable Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Way To Lead More Effectively

I think the idea of influence when it comes to leadership has become a really misunderstood idea. In organizations, we give a lot of weight to performance and getting things done.

How things get done, doesn’t really matter as much as that they get done….until the “how” does matter. This can create quite a confusing predicament for some leaders.

Often times I will get an email from an organization who will want me to coach someone who is really smart, really talented, and even seen as an expert in their field. The organization loves “what” the person does. And the “what” the person does is so good that the “how” they go about doing it is, to coin a phrase, pushed under a rug.

Everyone knows in the organization knows that “how” the leader goes about things is less than desirable…”But that’s just(insert whatever name you want here) Scott…You know how he is…We all just learn to work with him or work around him.”

In this post, I want to unpack this idea of influence a bit, but first, it is important you understand the event that gave me some real clarity.

In our family, we have a little dog whose name is Carlos.

We have had Carlos now for about 13 years. So for a dog, he is getting pretty old.

Carlos actually lost his sight a couple of years ago and is basically deaf as well. He is still pretty cute and gets around fairly well for an old guy. There are times when he does get a bit confused and gets a little lost in his own home.

That happened to Carlos the other day. He was sniffing around in our kitchen and as he was in search of any morsel that was dropped on the floor he made his way under the kitchen table.

Once he got under the table, with all the chairs around it he became confined in this maze. Every time he would turn and try and get out from underneath the table he would bump into a chair or table leg. Then he would back up a bit and try a different exit strategy only be foiled in his plan by yet another obstacle.

As I watched all this happen (don’t worry I didn’t let it go too long before I moved a chair and he found his way out), I got to thinking to myself…

If I had the problem Carlos had, what would my self-talk be like?

If I am honest I would be saying things like:

• Who put this stupid table here?

• Why didn’t somebody tell me if I went in here it would be hard to get out?

• How could you people all watch me struggle like this and not help me?

It was so easy for me to see myself blaming the kitchen table for my problems or shifting my issue to other people. The fact that I had this problem could not have anything to do with me at all.

Of course, the problem is totally mine!

My reality is that I am doing everything I can to get out of the table maze, the problem is that I can not see, that in fact, I am the problem!

I got myself into this mess and having the problem and the anxiety that goes along with it, I can not think of what the solution might be.

The anxiety I am feeling is causing me to not be able to think clearly.

Psychologists and people who work in leadership development have a name for this kind of thinking that does not reflect reality. It is called Self-Deception.

Self-Deception causes us to obscure the truth about ourselves which leads to all sorts of issues which ultimately undermines our ability to see and influence others. In the Emotional Intelligence world, we call this Reality Testing.

Leaders need the ability to assess the situation between what is experienced and what objectively exists.

The reality of the situation is if I put myself in Carlos’ shoes, that I am stuck and what objectively exists is that I don’t know how to get out. Self-Deception comes in as I try and shift the blame for how I got into this mess, and that I really need help getting out. Oh, how easy it is to blame; our coworkers, another department, a competitor, or even our poor mothers!

If we are going to lead more effectively we need to solve our Self-Deception crisis and really work on what it means to be a leader of influence.

Influence

I think in leadership circles, influence has really become misunderstood. What I mean is that we often see influence as “I got you to do what I want to be done”; ergo, I influenced you.

Well, the reality is that you think you have influenced me, and perhaps if you pay me enough money, or have enough power over me perhaps in some short-term thinking way you have. At least you have until I can find someone to pay me more money or I can find a way to get out from underneath your position of power.

True influence recognizes a couple of things. First that you as a leader have both performance AND people as part of the fruit that grows in your metaphorical leadership tree. One at the expense of the other is very short-term thinking.

If you are going to really influence others you have to get better at understanding their needs. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, and it doesn’t matter how hard you work. Frankly not too many people other than your mom really care. What they really need from you is to be heard by you. As you listen to the needs they have you are able to find ways to align your performance with what they need. I am not talking bout compromise here. In a compromise, both people lose something. No, I am advocating for how you as a leader can get done what you need to be done, while listening and helping others get what they need.

The only true way to influence others is to become empathic and really listen to what they need.

So how about it? Could you set aside your own needs for a moment, and work to understand what others might be needing.

I argue this is one way to really lead more effectively.

The One Thing To Remember in Giving and Receiving Feedback

I think one of the most difficult things to do in organizational life is to receive tough feedback.

Most of us go into our jobs wanting to be seen at best as a top performer and at the very least a valuable contributor to the organization.

So when someone sits you down to give you some feedback, how you receive this message can make a big difference as to the perception others will have of you.

Organizations spend lots of money on teaching managers and leaders how to give good feedback. Most “giving feedback” models include some type of framework that mandates at least 3 steps: (1) Provide context for the situation, (2) Give an assessment of a behavior, and (3) Declare the results of that behavior. The goal then is to enter into a conversation about what the person could do differently in that situation to get a different outcome. While there are probably some improvements to be made, the model in my estimation is directionally correct. It gets a conversation started, and is an attempt to help someone improve.

At the same time, there are some assumptions that get made inside of any feedback model that need to be addressed.

Case Study: Toni and Mia

Let’s consider a situation where Toni is Mia’s supervisor.  

Mia has been part of Toni’s team for about 8 months so Mia has had adequate time to observe how Toni is integrating her into the team. Mia has noticed that Toni is a bit more relationally distant from her than other members of the team, but she shrugs this off since Mia is still the newest team member.

Mia really loves the company and wishes she could say the same about working for Toni. She cannot pinpoint why she feels this way, but Toni seems to treat her differently from other team members. For example, Toni will often get into detailed conversations with other team members about hobbies or things going on in their personal lives, but everything with Mia seems to be about her projects at work. Flat out, Toni just spends more time with other members of the team. Maybe it is just a quantity of time thing, but the perception to Mia is that Toni just knows them better. One thing that Mia would say about herself is that she loves her work and others have even commented to her they wished they could care as deeply about their projects as Mia does.

The Feedback Process

As part of a routine organizational feedback process, Toni is tasked with gathering some feedback for each member of her team. For Mia, Toni will ask two or three team members what it is like to work with Mia. Simple, straightforward, open-ended, and as unbiased as possible on the part of Toni; just what is it like to work with Mia. Toni will then take her assessment of Mia’s performance and put it with the other feedback.

Once all of the data is collected Toni will develop one or two things that each person on her team could improve upon. The intention of the exercise is so that everyone is providing input and is able to make any behavioral course corrections if needed.

Toni’s Feedback for Mia

Toni’s challenge in preparing for her conversation with Mia became one of only focusing on two things. While she had some idea that Mia was struggling to integrate into the team she did not realize it was so evident to everyone else. Toni was grateful that the organization had a feedback model and even invested in a half-day of training to teach supervisors how to use it. She would need all that skill in her conversation with Mia.

The day came for the two to meet to discuss the feedback. Toni had decided on two talking points:

1. Grandstanding- People on the team thought that Mia was not sensitive to other projects the team had and that hers, by far, was the most important.

2. Constant Comparison-Toni had noticed in almost every conversation that Mia would compare how she was working on projects versus others on the team and this always came with how her way was better

Needless to say, when the two sat down the conversation did not go well. Even though Toni executed the feedback model with flawless accuracy she could tell Mia was both stunned by the feedback and hurt that people on the team actually felt this way. One of her comments to Toni was, “Who comes to work and tries to belittle others by doing these things. What is this 4th grade? Maybe folks around here are just a little too nice to each other and need to grow some thicker skin.” She finished the conversation with Toni by saying that the process needed to have a name change from Team Feedback to Shark Attack.

The one thing to remember in giving and receiving feedback

1. Recognize who is in the Power Seat. Most would assume, because of the power gradient that exists in organizations that the manager, in this case, Toni, is in the power seat. But studies actually show that it is the receiver of the feedback who is in control. The receiver gets to decide what is heard, what is reflected upon, and what ultimately will be acted upon. You may be saying, well yes, but if Mia doesn’t change her behavior she will get fired. And yes, this might be true, Toni is merely a messenger and Mia has the power to decide what her actions will be.

As the receiver of the feedback, realize your power position. Be as open as you can to what is being said. Ask good clarifying questions so you have all the information you need to decide if you are going to make any changes or not.

What do you think Mia and Toni could have done differently to get a better outcome? I’d love to hear your comments.

My Summer Reading List: Part Two

Last week on the blog I reviewed 3 of my favorite books (and one of my more equal favorites) from my summer reading list. If you happened to miss that post, you can click here and take a look to see if there is anything of interest to you.

Today I’m sharing the three titles that round out my favorite 2019 summer reading list:

The Legend of the Monk and the Merchant by Terry Felber

Like the Backpack from last week’s list, this book is a story that provides some really good life lessons.

While The Backpack focused on how we impact others with our emotions, this work focuses on providing perspective on what it means to be successful. More specifically, it addresses two key errors in thinking about personal wealth.

The first is that if you work hard, and as a result build some personal wealth, that this is evil in some way. The second error is that if you do create some wealth that this is somehow an indicator of God’s blessing or favor. The author does a fine job in story form of debunking both of these myths.

The story takes place primarily in Venice and seems to be in a time period just after the crucifixion of Christ. A time where there are great cathedrals and yet a lot is being learned about trade and valuing business relationships.

As you read, there are 12 principles that are unlocked that are both profound and simple at the same time.

Some of what the author calls ‘principles’ are debatable, but that is what I really like about the book. The author says” here is a principle or an idea,” and then seems to give space for there to be continued learning.

For example, Principle 2 is “Financial prosperity is often connected to soul prosperity.” While the author positions this as a principle, the word “often” would indicate it is not a hard and fast rule. There seems to be lots of room for people to discuss things like:

• What does financial prosperity mean?

• What does soul prosperity mean?

• Why is this not a universal truth?

The story is engaging. The principles are discussion-worthy (there is even a small group discussion guide in the back of the book). This book would be a good one to read and then journal what each of the principles means for you in your own life.

I think my favorite quote from this book needs some setup. Throughout the story, there are yearly meetings between the protagonist, Aleso, and his mentor. As Aleso prepares mentally for the final meeting the two will have, he asks himself, “I wonder what this year will bring?” I just love that question. While none of us knows or can predict the future, it is a great open and curious question. One to pause and reflect on.

Question for Reflection: If you ask yourself, “I wonder what this year will bring?” Rather than specifically trying to answer it, reflect just on how the question makes you feel? Where do your thoughts go? What memories are brought up that might be impacting how you even frame this question for yourself?

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Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr

Caution: This book will really make you think. In addition to just getting in your head, it could get you to stop and pause, asking some pretty intense questions of yourself like, “What is my life all about?”

As Rohr (a catholic priest by training) starts the book, he does so in a profound and soul-shattering way.

“There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.”

As I find myself these days, with my container primarily built, I am very interested in the idea of what my container is meant to hold. Rohr basically makes the case that the first half of your life is about building the container by understanding things like your worldview, your personality, your emotional self-awareness. The first half of life is about introducing you to yourself.

It is in the second half of life where the game really gets interesting.

Okay, so I am this person in the first half of life who is a materialist, born to be competitive, who is an extrovert, and who has grown an ability to see inside, really inside, of people. This is my container, albeit a very limited description. Now I find myself asking the question of what this container was meant to hold. Enter Richard Rohr and the idea of Falling Upward.

I even love the title of this book. So often we think about falling down. Rohr takes a scientific law of nature like gravity and says, in the spiritual world that law does not apply. You are learning and growing.

What I love about this learning approach is that it is about the usual cross points in life being a kind of “necessary suffering.”

What is it that I am supposed to be learning from the pain I have experienced in my life and putting this in the context of who I am (what I learned about myself in the first half of my life).

The psychologist Carl Jung said, “So much unnecessary suffering comes to the world because people will not accept the legitimate suffering that comes from being human.”

Rohr takes this idea and asks questions regarding what you can learn from your suffering to help others experience and process their suffering. Does this indeed help you understand your purpose and destiny in life?

Question for Reflection: Do you know enough about the container of who you are to begin to make sense of your suffering to invest in others?

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A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek

Spoiler Alert: Wilczek is a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics and this book is 328 pages of dense content.

The subtitle of this work is Finding Nautre’s Deep Design, and the thing I love about the book is the simple question it asks at the very beginning:

Does the world embody beautiful ideas?

If for no other reason, you should pick up a copy of this book and work through this question on your own.

My whole love of this book is that Frank is a physicist and therefore in love with numbers and theories and ideas. And yet he is willing to ask a very penetrating question that plays with the rational part of all of our brains.

What is beauty?

Now, there is a lot of math and physics in the book, but I found myself taking a lot of the stuff I did not understand for granted. I kept finding myself saying, “The guy has a Nobel Prize in Physics, I will trust what he is saying here is true.” I found the logic and the flow of the book to be so very well done. There is great integration of not only science but psychology and spirituality. Besides, I just love the question, what is beautiful?

My favorite quote comes on page 315, “Sometimes the most important step in understanding something is to realize you shouldn’t worry about everything. It’s usually better to be (maybe) right about something than “not wrong” about everything.” And that from a Nobel Prize winner.

Question for Reflection: What assumption in life are you holding on to that could cause you to be wrong about everything?

I hope you enjoy one of these books! If you do, or if you have a recommendation of your own, I’d love to hear it!

My Summer Reading List: Part One

I love books! Not e-readers, not audiobooks. For me, there is something about the feel of a real book in my hand.

The turning of the pages. Always having a “roller ball” pen to underline and mark them up. I just love the feel of the pen going across the paper. Sometimes I write notes in the margin. When something really motivates me, I will even start taking notes on the front pages of the book so that I have an easy reference to the pages that impacted me.

I am a self-admitted “readaholic.”

From time to time, folks ask me what I have been reading. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites from this summer. As I reflected on the over a dozen books I have consumed, these 6 really stood out for me. Since 6 is way too many to do in one blog post, I thought I would break it up into two posts over the next two weeks. I hope you find this interesting and if one of these titles intrigues you. I hope you will get a copy and have some fun with it. I have tried to organize these so there will be a lot of diversity in each of the two posts. I present them in no logical order since I loved them all and they all had some impact on my life.

The Backpack by Tim A. Gardner

I know I said in the paragraph above I loved all the books I read this summer, and that is true. But maybe I am a communist reader because I loved this one just a little more than all the rest.

The backpack is a story that primarily takes place on an airplane. The fact that it is a story with leadership implications really excites me. There are plenty of books out that are prescriptive in the self-help context. In this story, the backpack serves as a metaphor for our emotional self-awareness and emotional expression. The main idea here is that as a leader it is really important to understand and manage our own emotions while learning to love others along the way.

There is a life lesson application on almost every page. As I watched the characters move through the story I found myself saying, “I am glad I don’t do that.” Then I would ask my wife, “Do I ever do that?” She would answer, “I have seen you do that!” The point here is that we all have metaphorical emotional backpacks that we swing and hit other people with from time to time.

This book will make you stop and think about how you as a leader are really impacting others. In my opinion, it is a must-read and should be placed in every masters and doctoral program on leadership! If you liked the book “The Servant” by James C Hunter then you will LOVE the Backpack.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is when the main character, Jon, has a revelation and realized he is responsible for everything in his backpack and everything that comes out of it as well. His mentor in the book, Buddy, tells him, “The next big step, the step that takes all of the practice we were discussing, is realizing that our emotions need not be the excuse for bad behavior. We can, for the most part, decide what actually does come out of our backpack.”

Powerful idea, Tim! Really powerful!

Question for Reflection: Are you aware of what is coming out of your emotional backpack at all times?

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The Fearless Organization by Amy C Edmonson

If you are a leader, and if you are processing the above quote about controlling what comes out of your backpack, then this book by Amy Edmonson is for you. In a very clear and easy to read way, Amy walks you through all the research on why leaders who create psychological safety have better outcomes than those who do not.

The point is clear: hiring talented people is not enough! Especially if they show up and do not feel safe enough to display their talent.

Sometimes well-meaning folks cannot contribute because they do not recognize the need for their input. More often, according to Edmonson, it is because they are reluctant to stand out, be wrong, or offend the boss.

One of my favorite things about this book is that it totally gives leaders permission to look at their failures, not as absolutes but as learning. This book is really about unleashing to potential in followers by creating an environment where they feel safe. The more the culture helps people feel safe the better the work outcome will be. Period!

One of the most powerful moments in the book happened for me early on; “…in psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They fell willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge sensitive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!”

Question for Reflection: How are you doing at creating an organization where people feel safe?

---

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

This one is perhaps a bit personal, but I just had to include it on the list. As I write this, my siblings and I are working with my Mom in making decisions about how she wants to spend the years she has left (she is 83 years young). We are also impacted by the fact that she remarried about 8 years ago and her husband is now in a nursing home. I will spare you all the intimate details of the family dynamic, just to say I needed to learn more about what matters to people at the end of life.

Gwande is a physician and so kind and empathic as he lays out, from both his scientific and personal experiences, what people go through at the end of their lives. The book is so easy to digest as the main points are all made in a very readable, story form. He covers topics from what it means to be independent and how important that is to us all; to what assistance can look like and all the different forms it can take. There are really sensitive chapters on making hard choices and letting go.

Perhaps one of the most impactful quotes to me from the book is: “…as people’s capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives-resisting the urge to fill and fix and control.”

Powerful words for me as I balance helping my mom make decisions that are best for her without trying to control everything. I am trying to do a better job of listening and just being, rather than always being so processed focused on what task needs to be done next.

Question for reflection: How are you doing at listening without trying to control?

I hope you enjoyed these brief recommendations! Stay tuned for part two next week.

Will Removing These Leadership Lids Help You?

Not too long ago it was Taco Tuesday at the Livingston home. My wife, Kim, and I were assembling all the ingredients for our tacos: tortillas, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, sour cream, etc. I noticed my wife was struggling to take the lid off of the salsa jar, so I gently gestured for her to give me the jar and proudly assumed the position in heroically twisting the lid off the jar.

It wouldn't budge.

I put forth a little more effort, twisting harder this time. Nothing. I resorted to running it under hot water for a while, then took a towel to dry it before I tried again. Sure enough, the lid finally gave way and the jar was open for salsa to be enjoyed.

Earlier that day, I was talking with a good friend about leadership LIDS. During our conversation, the idea of the lid intrigued me. Yes, the lid is there as a cover, or protection, for what's inside, but it is also a cover, or barrier, keeping you away from what needs to be shared or utilized. Many times it's our own emotions and mentality that hold us back.

I want to focus on four of these potential barriers and consider how we can remove them: Loneliness, Indecisiveness, Defensiveness, and Selfishness.

As you read, think about your own leadership and which LIDS you need to remove. Which of these LIDS is holding you back from sharing what you have to offer?

Loneliness

This could be something you are experiencing in the workplace, or in your personal life. It can creep up when you've physically spent too much time on your own or you feel as if no one can relate to what you are going through or processing. Feeling alone is difficult, and doing alone is even more challenging. As humans, we are designed for relationships. Although alone time can be rejuvenating, we aren't meant to remain there in order to progress or thrive.

Remove this lid: Invite people into your world. Whether it's including them on a project you are working on or asking someone to coffee. If the loneliness doesn't subside and you are having trouble processing or expressing your thoughts, consider talking to a mentor, counselor, or coach.

Indecisiveness

You may say that being indecisive comes from the inability to make a decision because there's seems to be no wrong or right way to go. While that's true, I also see a lot of fear behind decision making. What if I make is the wrong choice? Making a decision is going to keep you moving while indecisiveness keeps you stagnant. How can you lead people if you aren't really going anywhere yourself?

Remove this Lid: Make a decision. Don't let the fear of failure keep you from moving forward. Making a mistake or taking a wrong turn doesn't mean you failed, instead, it's an opportunity to learn and grow.

Defensiveness

In the great American sport of football, the defensive line has a responsibility to keep the other team's offense and quarterback from advancing the field with the ball. They push. They fight. This creates struggle and tension, not to mention it is exhausting as they keep it up until the other team scores or it is their turn to play offense. I bring up this example because we tend to think of defense as protecting, yet the defensive line isn't protecting anything. They are pushing back and preventing advancement. We can often be defensive in our own lives, having the mindset that we are protecting something. This could be our job, our reputation, or more often than not, our pride. In this case, protection is a fallacy and our defensiveness creates a barrier and tension that prevents the advancement of our goals or our team.

Remove this lid: It takes some intentional awareness of your emotions to see when you may be acting defensively. Your heart might start beating faster, your body temperature may rise, you may feel your lips tighten, or you may unconsciously cross your arms. Try to identify what happens when you start to feel defensive, why you are feeling it, and what you might think you're "protecting." How is your defensiveness holding you and/or your team back?

Selfishness

Putting your needs and desires before others is the easiest way to explain selfishness. It is even easier, unfortunately, to get caught up in selfishness if we don't stop to think about what we are doing or behaving. Consider what your priorities are right now. Are you focusing on your own advancements and needs? What about those of your team and followers? Don't get me wrong, self-care is important, as long as it's not at the expense of another person.

Remove this lid: Think about your goals, priorities, and needs. What would it look like if you included your team in those goals, changing "I" statements to "we." Call on your team and followers to find our what their goals and priorities are, then think about how you can help them achieve their goals. Practice humility by stepping back, letting them take lead on a project, and praising them publicly for a job well done. Trust me, their success will be your success.

Homework

Think about our LIDS analogy above and identify one of them that you need to remove. What action steps or conversations do you need to have in order to remove them? What benefits will come to you and your followers when you remove the lid?

2 Effective Tools for Improving Team Health

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

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

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

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

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

My Story

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

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

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

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

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

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

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

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

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

Riding the Storm Out

I have been working on this post for about 3 weeks now. Sometimes posts and ideas come quickly to me, but this one has been very different. I have been trying to communicate an idea that is a bit difficult to wrap my head around.

How does our emotional intelligence impact our love for certainty in decision making?

AND THEN CAME DORIAN.

And the idea of how emotional intelligence relates to uncertainty in decision making became much more clear to me.

Consider this case

As a leader, you have recently taken an emotional intelligence self-assessment and your results show you have high Self-Regard. This means that you have a strong confidence in your strengths and a clear knowledge of your weaknesses. You are feeling good about that.

Then, as you continue to read your assessment, you see that you are less certain on how to really solve problems that arise that have a clear emotional component. The assessment you took calls this Problem-Solving.

The coach who is helping you understand the impact of your emotions on your leadership says one way to think about this high level of Self-Regard and weaker ability to solve emotional problems that arise is that you double down on certainty to solve the problem you are facing.

It is not that you avoid the problem. Quite the contrary. You don’t quite understand the emotion associated with the problem, so you lean on your confidence and intuition.

Fast forward a week or so and someone on your team has made a mistake. Not just any mistake, but one that is going to cost half of your department’s quarterly budget. The implications of this error are profound:

• The team off-site will have to be cancelled

• Two vendors who are helping you solve an IT issue that is already 3 months behind will have to stop working until next quarter

• You are hoping your boss isn’t going to hold bonus money from the team

• Not to mention, the impact of this on your team’s yearly performance reviews

Since you are a naturally competitive person who was born to win, rather than step back for a moment and consider the emotional impact this problem is having, your knee jerk reaction is to control the situation and double down on your certainty of how to act.

You lean into all your competitiveness and desire to control the situation. That swirling fear of the unknown causes you to begin to awfulize the event that has occurred, giving it far more weight than it deserves.

Your boss emails you and wants to meet with you the next morning to “understand” what happened. You quickly shift into problem-solving mode. Rather than call the team together and process the event in a quick after action review, you put together a 10 slide presentation that will show your boss exactly what happened and how to most certainly prevent this from ever happen again.

Except…

It Won’t.

This is because the imbalance between your Self-Regard and your Problem-Solving will continue to take you to certainty when emotional problems arise. Rather than examining the emotion associated with the problem so that you better understand what really happened, you overplay your strength.

You feel the meeting with your boss went well. You explained with great confidence what happened and what you planned to do about it.

Nonetheless, the impact of this gap in emotional intelligence is real.

What you will never know is that while you felt the meeting with your boss went well, she has a different perspective. She didn’t want a 10 slide action plan, she just wanted to better understand what happened. You went into fix it mode, she wanted to know the gist of the problem. Your need for certainty and being uncomfortable with ambiguity was a reason she doesn’t see you as strategic. She communicates this to her peers and HR in a personnel planning meeting. She is not supportive of promoting you until you improve your strategic agility. Your bosses feedback to you will be that the organization doesn’t really see you as being strategic.

Likely this is not what is happening at all….

What Does Dorian have to do with all of this?

Since my wife and I live in Orlando, this storm has real meaning for us. As I am writing these words we are preparing for lots of wind and rain.

As I watched the weather people tried to predict what is going to happen. I quickly realized no one actually knows. And yet, the weather folks on TV have to come on with a great deal of confidence, even if they are unsure of all the variables that will go into deciding where this storm will actually hit.

Realizing the emotion that accompanies a storm like this, and that you can not, even with all your self-confidence ,control the outcome, is in some way comforting.

It is not if problems are going to arise but when. The wisdom is in how you are going to respond.

I argue this wisdom has something to do with your emotional intelligence and the balance you have in your strengths and weakness.

See you all after Dorian. Please pray for Florida!!

It’s your choice.

Hi Gang,

I am taking a week off this week, but want to introduce you to a friend of mine who has just written a fantastic book called "Backpack", Dr. Tim Gardner.

I really think you will enjoy this post and do hope you stop for a moment and consider your own Backpack.

Here is a link for you to get a copy of the book. I really think you will enjoy it. It is one that I recommend you read and then read again with your team. A lot of great discussion can come from a work like this.

Enjoy!

Do you ever think about all of the people that are impacted by the choices you make?

Seriously. Every personal choice. Every single day. Every person impacted.

If you stop and reflect on it, which all leaders should … regularly … uh, daily … you’ll realize that it’s a BIG number. Some we see; some we don’t see. Too many we don’t even think about.

We may be inclined to think that a substantial part of our total daily choices only help (or hurt) ourselves, like the food we choose to eat, to exercise (or not), how much we sleep, whatever we listen to on our commutes, and so forth. But I could easily argue that even those choices affect others because they all can affect our physical and psychological health; they impact our moods and our body. What I do with me has an impact on others – negative, positive, or neutral – whether I realize it or not.

There is a gentleman that I frequently see at the gym where I play racquetball. Typically, I observe him on one of the exercise machines where there is a bench – because that’s where he’s sitting working on a crossword puzzle. I’ve never seen him pull on a lever or lift a weight. I’m guessing he goes home and tells his wife he had a good workout. Maybe even tells himself that. I could be wrong, but…. She hopes he’s getting healthier, but is he? Well, maybe his brain is. Although he may not see it today or tomorrow, his choices are affecting others

Those personal choices (and many more) impact the people in our lives; but so do our not so personal choices. Those choices that have an immediate impact on others, good or bad. Even further, some of our choices may seem personal at first, but can quickly and ultimately have a huge negatively impact on those in our path.

Dr. Scott Livingston is a good friend of mine as well as a fantastic executive coach. He recently passed on a story that is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. It reminded Scott of the ideas discussed in my book, The Backpack. A client of his had been out to dinner with their family when they observed a young man who was:

• Inattentively walking through the restaurant, which caused him to

• Inadvertently run into a waiter, who happened to be

• Carrying a tray full of waters, that ultimately

• Spilled all over six innocent bystanders trying to enjoy their meal.

They were all collateral victims of the young man’s metaphorical backpack.

The backpack represents our self-awareness. Complete self-awareness is more than being aware of me and taking responsibility for me. It also always includes an understanding of exactly how I am impacting others. Am I whacking you with my backpack as walk by you or not?

Are my choices helping you? Or hurting you?

True self-awareness is understanding, owning, and making changes to the trajectory of the inevitable domino effect of my choices, both positively and negatively. I’m hurrying, not paying attention, and run into another person; that person is personally negatively impacted, but the next domino falls when he spills the water he was carrying that, another domino, negatively impacts six other people who were now not only drenched, but had their meal impacted, domino, domino.

Our choices can have a bigger domino affect than we realize. And, of course, our positive choices can have the same pay-it-forward results.

We shop at a local grocery store where you get a cart by depositing a quarter that you get back when you return the cart. This past week, I was walking up when a man offered me a cart. I offered him a quarter and he said, “No, thanks, it was given to me.” So, of course, I did the same thing for the first customer I saw when I was coming out of the store. Yes, it’s small. I actually do it every time I go, even if I’m the one to put the quarter in to get the cart. I just give it to the next person. It’s only a quarter!

And guess what? Everybody smiles. Every time.

In The Backpack, one of the main characters is a wise, old cowboy named Buddy. Here is one of the ways he views life:

Buddy knew that every single encounter with every single person on every single day presented a single opportunity. He could make their day better, worse, or to have no impact at all. Buddy preferred making things better.

How many people are impacted by the choices we make?

Reflect on it.

Then decide if you need to use the exercise machine, or cleanup a tray of spilled waters, or spend a quarter.

It’s your choice.

One Important Truth and Three Tips On Self-Awareness

This morning started off like most mornings for me when I am home and working from my home office: make my way to the kitchen and fix a pot of coffee.

I have done this exact same thing at least 20,000 times in my life.

Our coffee pot is a simple one consisting of only 3 parts: a glass carafe, the “maker” which essentially boils the water and dispenses it over the coffee grounds, and the filter basket where the coffee grounds sit.

That’s it.

3 parts, of which I am really familiar. In fact, according to Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers, I am an expert in coffee making 2 times over.

I think you know where this is heading.

This morning I got up, filled the maker with water, put the coffee in the paper filter, put the paper filter in the maker, and turned it on…

Did you notice anything?

That’s right. No filter basket.

Which means that the paper filter with all the grounds in it fell into the large hole in the coffee maker. To say I had a mess is no small statement.

Seeing and recognizing are not the same thing

As I thought about what just happened several ideas came to mind:

• Maybe I was still a bit groggy and half asleep.

• Had my wife put the filter basket back in the coffee maker where it belonged…

• If I didn’t have to walk the dog and make coffee, maybe I would have had more time to focus
  on the task.

Do you hear the excuses?

I know you do, because if you are honest you likely use similar excuses frequently when things don’t go your way. It is easier to put the blame outside yourself rather than to own what is happening in your world. It is easier to blame the environment, other people, or your circumstances rather than own up to what is happening.

• I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing (even though I am a self-proclaimed coffee making expert).

• My wife had nothing to do with my not recognizing the filter basket was not in the coffee maker.

• I had more than enough time between 6am and my first meeting at 9am to make coffee and walk the dog.

The real problem for me this morning is that I saw there was no filter basket in the coffee maker. I had to have seen it. I have made over 20,000 pots of coffee in my life. Every pot I have ever made uses the same three functional parts.

Oh, I saw it alright...

I just didn’t recognize it.

To me, this is the essence of being self-aware as a leader: Recognizing when things are not quite right.

Three Tips To Be More Self-Aware

• Slow Down Your Routine

  Routines take things we used to have to think about and makes them unconscious. This distinction is what Daniel Kahnemen, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, describes as making System I thinking become System II. It is taking your “gut” feelings and putting some rational thought behind them.

• Challenge Your Status Quo

  Are the behaviors that have made you successful in the past going to get you where you want to be in the future? Mix it up a bit and learn. This will give you new insights and recognitions, helping you to slow down and think more about what you are doing.

• Find a Friend/Coach/Mentor

  Not that person who always takes your side or tells you what you want to hear. You need someone who can help you move from seeing to recognizing, then help you experiment with new behaviors so that you know what to practice.

My hope for you is a leader is that you become more self-aware so that you can have an inspirational impact on those you lead.

Thats all for now. I have to go make another pot of coffee.

Building Leadership Muscle

My arms are sore.

Not run of the mill sore because my workout was hard, but really sore.

Sore to the point where it hurt just bringing a cup of coffee to my mouth for a sip of coffee in the morning.

So sore that even as I am typing these words, I am having to take a break and stretch my triceps.

600mg of Ibuprofen four times a day and a Biofreeze massage at least three times a day sore.

Achy sore triceps. That is how I am feeling as I am writing this post.

The Back Story

Many of you know I am an avid exerciser. My workout of choice these days is Orange Theory, a heart rate workout where the goal is to be 84-91% of your target heart rate for at least 12 minutes of a 60 minute class.

My usual workout cadence is to take 2 to 3 classes every week. In a typical workout I will burn around 700 calories, but the best thing for me is how I feel about an hour after my workout. I have energy, and that positive happy feeling that only endorphins can provide.

However, I took the month of July off from Orange Theory for two reasons. First, I felt like my body just needed a rest. In addition, we were going to be traveling for some vacation, teaching, and work commitments, so I did not try to find a gym.

I did do some light jogging and played my fair share of golf, but in the month of July really nothing more than that on the exercise front.

Then we got home and I said to my wife, “We need to get back to the gym!” So last Thursday we signed up for a class.

It felt really good to get back into the gym. The workout was a really good one that focused on the tricep muscles and some endurance running. Nothing I had not done before. I did not really use too heavy of a weight, nor did I push myself to any extreme.

But the next day…two… three…four... and five…

Did I mention how sore my arms are?

Application to Leadership Development

This morning I met with a client who completed an emotional intelligence self-assessment in a workshop with me a few weeks ago and he scheduled some time to talk more in-depth about what his report was communicating.

For the most part, my client had emotional intelligence scores on average where most people score. This is a very bright and articulate person who has a good understanding of how emotions impact his relationships and decision making.

He did, however, have one competency that was significantly lower than the other 14 that are measured by the tool.

As I asked him about how this lack of emotional awareness showed up in his leadership life, he shared stories where the skill just did not properly develop. He has been using other emotional intelligence competencies to compensate for the lack of the one deficit, so he gets along well in work and life.

However, he told me that he wanted to begin to work on the area he was not using, so I gave him 2 new exercises to help him begin to develop this new emotional intelligence muscle.

After describing the “workout” to him, we entered into a time of practicing the new behavior. When we finished, I asked him what he thought it was going to be like for him to execute this on his own.

He said,”Honestly, I am a little bit afraid and I know it is going to be painful, but I know that if I can get stronger at this I will be a better leader for my team.”

He had some skill in this area already, he had just not exercised it in a while. So the pain he is describing is the breaking down of, and subsequent building of, muscle.

Everything he needed was in his emotional intelligence package. It just needed to be strengthened.

Indeed some pain and soreness along the way, but in the end, a much more self-aware leader.

I shared a thought with him that I want to leave you with as you consider developing your own leadership muscle:

Most of our fear comes from the exaggeration of bad consequences.

Now, before you finish reading, pause for a moment. Go back and read that bolded sentence again. Let it brew in your mind a bit. See if you can find a place in your leadership life where this is happening.

We play out this story in our minds, imagining the worst possible outcomes of what will happen to us, to the point of being irrational. We make things up in our minds that just are not true, then we work to convince ourselves that we are right.

While you might get a little sore once in a while after working out a muscle that has not been used much, you will live…and you will be stronger for having worked on becoming a better, more effective, and wise leader.

Borrowed from NASA: 3 of My Favorite Team Learning Strategies

For the past 6 years I have been asked to be an instructor for the Doctor of Organizational Leadership program at Indiana Wesleyan University. It has become one of my favorite weeks of the year.

I get the opportunity to engage with a very diverse group of adults who have backgrounds ranging from education and business to non-profit and government intelligence (where you really can not know what they do!)

The one thing they all have in common is the seeking of an advanced degree. As I talked with the students I learned there are a lot of reasons they decided to enter into such a rigorous academic program. Everything from a cure for boredom to career advancement.

The subject I teach for the week is Adult and Organizational Learning; one that both students and practitioners of leadership need to really pay close attention to. I think one of the primary responsibilities leaders have in organizations is to help followers learn. Making sure that there is a safe place for people to learn becomes a critical success factor in successful organization.

Amy Edmonson, in her book, The Fearless, Organization: Creating Psychological Safety In the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth states, "Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process.”

3 Strategies

One of the articles we review in the course I teach is written by Edward Rogers and Mike Ryschkewitsech where they outline six different strategies NASA uses to capture knowledge and facilitate learning. I thought it would be fun to outline 3 of my favorites for you so you can use them as a bench mark for how you are doing in your organization and/or with your team.

1. Pause and Learn - The idea behind this strategy is that not only at the end of an event or mission, but at key times along the way, to have the team STOP and talk about what they are learning as they go. This can be an important benchmark to understanding the culture of the group so that the leader knows what the thoughts are and can decide if any course corrections are needed.

   You really want to be intentional with the “pause” in this strategy. Get a meeting site that is not one where you regularly meet. This is not a time for routine, but putting people in a different context so they can really dig in and think about what it is they need to learn. Then review what was supposed to happen and lay out what did happen. As the discussion ensues, make sure you are getting and recording all the input from every participant. All opinions are valid and needed if the learning is going to be complete. Then have the team organize the thoughts from the discussion and summarize any key actions needed moving forward.

2. Knowledge Sharing Workshops - Successful organizations thrive on learning. Successful leaders will from time to time hold sessions for anyone in the organization to attend to share the good work their team is doing. These meetings can range from 90 minute sessions to full day events and are meant to not only shed some light and learning on what your group is doing, but can also be used as a successful recruiting tool for talent.

3. Case Studies - I realize this is not a new idea, but I certainly think it is under utilized. Cases can be written and shared around seminal events that a team has experienced and then disseminated amongst groups for learning. The main idea is to look at the inputs and decisions that a group had as they worked through problems. Then this learning can be shared and discussed by others in the organization.

One example might be a team who is new formed and built from the ground up writes a case that shows all the inputs and decisions and then makes this available for other teams to learn from as they interview and build teams of their own. Case studies are unique ways to capture organizational learning and sharing in a safe and productive learning environment.

If you have successes with any of these, or other knowledge sharing strategies, I would love to hear from you and learn from your experience. Please reach out to me and share your learning. Maybe we could write some case studies together?

Unless Someone Cares

I came across an interesting piece of research the other day in the International Journal of Manpower that I just cannot stop thinking about.

Carolyn Wiley is a researcher and professor of management at Roosevelt University. In 1995 she repeated a study that had been conducted in 1946, 1980, 1986, and then again in 1992. 

Over 40 years of survey data were analyzed to learn what factors really motivate people to do their best work.

I know what some of you analytical types are saying right now…Scott, that data is at least 25 years old…shouldn’t you write about something a little more current?

Before you stop reading, I would ask you to ponder for yourself; how much has your motivation to do your best work really changed?

Sure, we are all a bit different. The things happening in society when the data was collected was different. But when you look at the data as an aggregate, are things really all that different?

Some popular responses to the motivation question from the survey are:

• Full appreciation of work done

• Help with personal problems

• Job security

• Good wages

• Interesting work

• Personal or company loyalty

• Promotion and growth in the company

• Good working conditions

• Tactful discipline

When studying the 1992 data overall, there are a lot of differences between different groups:

• Part-time workers placed more emphasis on interesting work, while full-time workers placed more value on personal loyalty.

• Women placed greater importance on appreciation for work done, while men placed more value on interesting work.

• There were no statistical differences in motivation by age group. All groups decided on good wages as their first choice.

What I found most interesting is that across the 40 years measured by the study, only one factor made the top two motivators when all of the data is combined. Take a look at the list at some of the top vote getters again and see if you can figure out which one matters most.

Here is the list for you to study:

• Full appreciation of work done

• Help with personal problems

• Job security

• Good wages

• Interesting work

• Personal or company loyalty

• Promotion and growth in the company

• Good working conditions

• Tactful discipline

If you guessed “full appreciation of work done” then you either read the International Journal of Manpower or you are really in tune with what people in organizations want.

I guess that is why the picture in this post really caught my attention.

If I am not valuing and appreciating the folks that I interact with on a routine basis then I am leaving one of the two top motivators for those I work with out of the equation for obtaining whatever business objective I have in front of me.

It is so easy to say to yourself, “of course I do this,” but do you really? Do you really tell those in your organization “thank you" enough?

Perhaps and even better question is, do they feel it? Do they feel it to the point where it is a motivation for them to give their very best?

I will leave you to ponder this for yourself.  Let me know what you think by dropping a comment below.