7 Steps to Increasing Your Followers

With all the crazy in our world these days, most leaders I speak with barely have enough time to get their jobs done, let alone spend any significant time catching up on things they enjoy reading. I know for me it has been that way, I am about 3 books behind in my own reading schedule. The other thing I really enjoy that I just have not taken as much time for is keeping up with my journal reading. The journal Leadership is one of my favorites. 

I had a client who needed to reschedule the other day and I jumped on the journal Leadership’s website to see what was posted in the last couple of years. I was really intrigued by the framework of the August 2020 issue from 2 years ago. The entire journal is dedicated to the shift being seen in how effective leadership is being practiced. Here are a couple of the articles:

1. The price of wearing (or not wearing) the crown: The effects of loneliness on leaders and followers

2. Barriers to leadership development: Why is it so difficult to abandon the hero

3. Toward a methodology of studying leadership-as-practice

I find it very interesting to think about the leader not being the hero. For too long, we have been sucked into thinking that the leader will rush in and save us. That the leader is some sort of mystical figure who is smarter, more engaging, or has more energy than the average man.

As I watch other organizations and spend time reading and thinking about this, I am becoming convinced that nothing could be further from the truth.

Even certain personality constructs like Myers-Briggs give homage to types that they say are natural leaders like the ENTJ (see Myers-Briggs for more details). There are so many implicit and explicit biases in this kind of nonsense that the idea is almost laughable.  

Since leadership has such a strong relational component, I am becoming convinced that true leadership is really about whether others will follow. There will always be a consideration given that in certain circumstances people might have to follow. There is some power gradient in play where a person feels they have to tolerate the leader. But this is a leader in name only, or maybe a better term is boss or supervisor. 

True leaders have followers; not because they have to, but because they choose to.

Those following the leader do so because they buy into the vision. They find the work they contribute toward the vision to be interesting and worthy to spend their lives doing. Those in followers have heightened levels of accountability. They feel responsible for the vision and they understand their role in making it happen.

There are very significant trends (all being accelerated by COVID over the past couple of years) in the direction of follower models replacing traditional heroic, leader-centric models. These follower-centric models are replacing what many are now calling the “heroic” leader. The leader is no longer the center of the workflow to create leadership, rather, as Barbara Kellerman writes in her book, Followership, “Followership” implies a relationship between subordinates and superiors and a response of the former to the latter.”   

I really like the idea of followership as it brings into balance the task and the relationship side of the leadership equation. Followership is about empowering teams to higher levels of performance where the leader is setting the vision, building a safe environment, fostering learning, recognizing contributions, and maybe most of all not the focus of the attention.

Are You Creating Followership?

The above question is a good one for leaders in organizations to sit back and ask themselves. Really spend some time reflecting on your ability to create an environment where people choose to follow your vision, and not because they have to for some organization hierarchy or power gradient reason.  

Here is a little checklist of 7 things to reflect on your own ability to create more followers:

1. Clearly describing the vision - In a few words can I articulate our purpose?

2. Repeatedly giving the vision - How many times a day do I bring the work people back to the vision?

3. Reciprocal trust - Do followers feel psychologically safe to be themselves so they can contribute? Do you really understand their relational needs that unlock their true potential?

4. Learning - Do we encourage learning including: asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, and even making mistakes?

5. Expectations - Are they as clear to your followers as they are in your own head?

6. Coaching - Do you really want to win; or do you just want to be seen as a good coach?

7. Two-Tier feedback - Are you willing to examine original assumptions that were made or do you just give feedback on observed behavior?

I gave you these 7 ideas and questions not really as a model for followership, but more of a checklist to ask yourself or others around you how you are really doing at fostering the relational side of leadership.

I would love to have your perspective on increasing your followers and followership. If you have a comment, please put it below. Love hearing from you.

Will These Three Ideas Help You Succeed?

What questions have you been asking yourself as you build your success story? Perhaps, one is, “As HR Vice President, what does leadership development look like?” Or, “As a sales leader, how can I balance work and family?” Or possibly, “As a Church Pastor, what do I need to do to grow my congregation?”

These are tough, yet realistic problems that we face as professionals, but I think we need to reframe the questions.

Any coach (whether formal or informal, external or internal, paid or volunteer, executive, life or organizational) must have the skill of listening and then reframing questions. Reframing a question provides a different perspective on the issue at hand.

As a coach, it is my job to reframe questions in order to help you get to the heart of the matter. Rather than asking about leadership development, I would challenge you to ask the real question, “What do I need to do to get promoted to my next role in the company?”

Or if you’re a sales leader, what I really hear you asking is, “If I sacrifice time with my family, will it be worth it financially?”

Or to the pastor, I would reframe the question as, “What should I be doing to grow my church? I am doing everything the books say to do, but nothing is working!”

Please don’t misunderstand my point. I do think that people want to know how you approach things, how you set goals, how you solve problems, how you prioritize resources, and how you assess risk. But, the answers they want will direct back at themselves.

Enter the world of what psychologists call self-efficacy.

Research On Self-Efficacy

Self-Efficacy is a fancy term for belief in yourself; confidence in the capabilities and talents you have been given and developed. Studies have shown that the confidence you have in your capabilities affects your performance and is linked to happiness, satisfaction, and well-being. All of these attributes in one way or another link to success.

Research published in the December 2016 issue of the Consulting Psychology Journal outlines that you can help those you coach be more successful by following three simple ideas:

1. Invest the Time: The confidence of the person increased as the coaching relationship evolved over time. As you coach others over the course of your conversation, notice how their confidence increases toward the coaching objective. When it does, make them aware that you are seeing this increase in confidence.

2. Say it Out Loud: The more the client verbally articulates their confidence, the higher the achievement of the goal actually becomes. “I am going to do this” types of statements show confidence in the client's ability. The more they make commitments out loud, the increased likelihood of belief in themselves.

3. Ask the Right Question at the Right Time: In this study, questions asked by coaches fell into three categories:

   • Open-ended - “What do you want to do?"

   • Proposing Solutions - “Could your search for other companies that offer better possibilities?”

   • Provide Support - “You know what? That sounds like a great idea."

The research points to proposing solutions as the only effective method of triggering self-efficacy statements in the very first coaching session. While the other two methods are also valid, they merely enhanced the confidence of the other person throughout the coaching engagement.

As you work with and coach others on your team, especially if you have more of a long-term relationship, focus on asking them open-ended questions and providing support for the ideas they bring to the table. Too many of us fall into the trap of proposing solutions because it makes us feel better about ourselves or like we added real value. I would argue that the value you bring is the investment of time and the belief in the person you are coaching. The research says that the value of you proposing solutions early in a coaching relationship does little to improve the confidence or belief in the mind of the person you are working with.

How would your work environment change if you focused on building the confidence of others in your organization? Will these three ideas we discussed help you succeed? When you are coaching others, resist the temptation to make the coaching about you by offering advice and providing them solutions. Really focus on practicing open-ended questions and providing your client the support they need.

5 Tips Based on Over 15 Years of Working From Home

The Coronavirus pandemic caused and is still causing many of us to rethink assumptions we never thought we would have to consider.  As a result, many of you who have maybe worked a day or two from home now and then might find yourself working from home more often, or even indefinitely now.

Some schools have even decided to move to online formats and are requiring students to stay home, forcing many workers into new scenarios that they had never faced before when it comes to working remotely, and many parents have had to make the decision to homeschool their kids.

There is some good news in all of this. A Harvard study in 2019 stated that people who can work from wherever they choose were 4.4% more productive than those who had fixed, rigid work requirements.  I actually was a bit shocked and thought this might be higher, but my fear is that not everyone who chooses where they work from will follow the same discipline that they would in an office environment. 

So, I thought I would give you some of my thoughts on how I have navigated these “free to choose your workspace” waters for myself (although for some this may be a forced choice).  

These tips are not based on any specific research. I will typically spend several hours researching and crafting a blog post, but this post is different. It is just my opinion.  What I write may not fit you or your style, and that’s okay.

5 Tips Based on 15+ Years of Working From Home:

1. Guard Your Attitude Against Loneliness.  

   I am starting with attitude because many of you really enjoy the social aspect of work.  If you had a question about something, you were used to popping your head into someone’s office to get an answer  When you are working from home, the feeling of loneliness can be very real.  I like to intentionally schedule meetings early in the morning and in the late afternoon that have a “check-in” social component to them.  I always have a cup of coffee (you substitute your social non-alcoholic beverage of choice) in the morning and my seltzer water (love that fizz) in the afternoon. There is something that just feels social for me about sharing a beverage with someone while we are talking.  I also try, if at all possible, to do these calls over video chat.  I just love Zoom, it is so easy to use and within 30 seconds I can schedule the meeting, put it on my calendar, and send the invite to someone.  

2. Carve Out Dedicated Work Space.

   I realize that this work-from-home scenario many are facing may not have given you a completely dedicated office with a door and a desk and a comfy leather chair. You really don’t need all of that, anyway, but you do need a place that is going to be your designated work space. It is important that you dedicate that space to work and that it is not in front of the TV while the news stations broadcast all of the latest news. Having a dedicated space will tell your brain this is now where you work. If you can avoid it, try not to make the kitchen table your office, because this is likely a grand central station in your house, if it is at all like mine, and it is really hard to have meetings and concentrate with a lot of traffic. 

3. Keep Your Routine.

   If you are used to being at the office by 7:30 am, continue to get up at the same time. If you shower in the morning, then by all means continue this habit. Get dressed like you are going to work and be at your desk by 7:30 am, ready to engage.  What you may find is that when you don’t have your normal commute, you can put that time to good use and do something like starting that book you have always wanted to get to but just never had the time.  If you eat lunch, take a lunch break. You can still schedule lunch meetings if you want, just warm up your soup or make your sandwich and do the meeting over video conference.  One thing I find about working from home is that I have to get up and take more frequent stretches and walks.  I try and keep them around 5 or 10 minutes, but I try and get up at least every 60 to 90 minutes and stretch.  Then, end your day when you would typically leave your office.  Pick up your book and read another chapter to account for your commute.  When you are finished working, then close your device and be finished.  

   WARNING: Working from home is not a time to “sort of work” while you clean the shower that has not been cleaned in a while. Your organization is still expecting full work productivity. Don’t fall into the trap of half-working and half-doing whatever else needs to be done at home. 

4. Communicate Expectations.  

   Most people who you work with will understand that everyone has probably adapted to a new normal. Your family and friends may not understand this still. They may see this as, well, “mom and dad are home, so it must be like the weekend”.  I have found it really important to communicate with my wife that when I am working, it is like I am not here. Now, if there is an emergency, then by all means come get me. But this should be rare like a total eclipse of the sun. If you clearly establish boundaries I think you will find you will be just as, if not more, productive. Running out of mac and cheese or paper towels will have to wait until you would normally get home to resolve the issue.  I have found that kind words like, “Is this an emergency, or can it wait until I am finished working?” works well for me and helps establish appropriate boundaries.  

5. Pay Attention to Habits.

   You are in an interesting space of getting to form some new habits when you work from home. For this, we turn to the research. Wendy Wood, in her book “Good Habits/Bad Habits”, reviewed 64 studies and found that for some behaviors, people’s actions aligned with their intentions. For example, if they intended to get a flu shot or enroll in a class, they did as they intended. The stronger the plan for these one-off types of things, the more likely they were to do them. But for other behaviors and actions that are repeated more often, intentions didn’t matter that much. Things like taking a bus or recycling, for example. People might want to recycle but it turns out that intention doesn’t matter that much here. Persistence and the formation of habit have little to do with willpower or the mere desire to accomplish something.  What is needed is the repetition of the desired behavior. So, as you think about working from home, put all your good intentions aside and practice what it is that you want your behavior to be.

I hope you found this interesting to think through as we all navigate a new age of a lot of people working from home.   If you know someone who works from home or is going to be in the future, why not forward this post to them and encourage them to sign up for the blog?

 If you have ideas on how to be successful working from home, please send me a note with your thoughts. I promise to give you credit for your idea if I do a “reader’s hacks” type post in the future.

Are You Happy With Your Level of Well-Being?

A client once said to me, "Scott, I realize I need to take better care of myself. When I do that, I am at my best. I have decided to do yoga when I get up in the morning and exercise again at noon. I am going to be more conscious of my diet and make better choices about what goes into my body."

When I probed for the reason, he continued.

"Recently, there has been a lot of negativity in my life and I am just not going to allow it to get me down any longer. I am choosing to be the leader I want to be and not be a weak victim of my circumstances."

His decision prompts me to ask this question to you:

How are you, as a leader, focusing on your emotional well-being?

There’s a great story of 2 out of 180 nuns that were the subjects of a study on longevity and happiness. If you want all the details, you can read the book  Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, for some interesting facts and percentages about the nuns.

Studies of longevity are very complex from a purely scientific standpoint. Causality is extremely difficult to make a case of. However, one of the reasons this study is so impactful is that nuns lead very similar lives. They eat basic food, don’t smoke or drink alcohol, and have similar routines. Of course, there are differences such as intellect, depths of spirituality, and outlook on the future that could account for the varied results in the nuns.

However, none of these aspects made any difference in the research. In his book, Seligman points out that the largest contributor to their longevity was the sheer amount of positive feelings.

According to the National Wellness Institute, wellness is "an active process through which people become aware of, and then make choices toward, a more successful existence."

Four things to notice about wellness:

• It is an active process. It is something you devote energy to making happen. It is intentional on your part as a leader.

• It starts with self-awareness. Are you aware of the moment when health choices present themselves?

• Wellness is a choice. You decide to be well in the moment or you decide to say “screw it” and become a victim of your circumstance.

• There is an end game. A successful existence. This is your life. You only get one. Why not make it the very best that it can be?

Emotional intelligence and well-being:

One of the attributes we measure in Emotional Intelligence training is either Happiness or Well-being. In our model there are four factors that comprise Well-being:

1. Self-Regard: Believing in yourself and living according to your values.

2. Self-Actualization: A willingness to learn and grow in accordance with your beliefs.

3. Interpersonal Relationships: Engaging in mutually satisfying relationships.

4. Optimism: The ability to respond, recover, and claim a happy state from disappointments and setbacks in life

Two considerations for evaluating your own level of well-being:

1. The first is attempting to display as many of these four attributes as you can.

   • Believe in yourself and live according to your values.

   • Learn and grow in areas that really matter to you.

   • Have friends that reciprocate these areas.

   • Realize that things in life are not always going to go your way. What counts is how you respond when setbacks happen.

2. The second is to have a balance between these attributes.

   • For example, you want to make sure that your self-regard is balanced with your interpersonal relationships.

   • If you have a high level of self-regard and low levels of interpersonal relationships, you could come across as prideful.

   • If you have low levels of self-regard and high interpersonal relationships, then you could come across as needy and not fun to be around. It’s all about balance.

As you think about the successful life you want to live as a leader:

Are you choosing to maximize and balance these 4 attributes of emotional health?

What changes can you make to ensure that you live a long and successful life?

Will Removing These Leadership "LIDS" Help You?

One 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 of 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 had actually been 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, using “LIDS” as an acronym for: Loneliness, Indecisiveness, Defensiveness, and Selfishness.

As you read on, think about your own leadership and which “LIDS” you need to remove. Which of these “LIDS” could be 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 things alone can be even more challenging. As humans, we are designed for relationships. Although alone time can be rejuvenating, we aren't meant to remain alone in order to progress or thrive.

How to remove this “LID”: Invite people into your world. Whether it's including them on a project you are working on or asking someone to go out for a 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 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?

How to 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.

How to 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.

How to 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 out 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” acronym above and identify one or more 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 employees or followers when you remove the lid?

An Effective Strategy to STOP Awfulizing

I can remember as a young 18 year old driving from Peoria, Illinois where my family lived to Des Moines, Iowa, the home of Drake University. I was a very young college student in my second year of Pharmacy school. I had decided to not take the interstate and instead to meander along the back roads through some small towns through Illinois and Iowa. 

I was only about 60 miles from home when all of a sudden my ‘66 Chevy Belair didn’t want to go any faster than 35 miles an hour. The speed limit at the time was 55 miles an hour on those highways and cars were passing me. During those years as a young macho driver, this embarrassed me. In those days, driving fast was what we did. My memory was that speed limits seemed more like a suggestion than the law. I even had a theme that I drove by “Nobody passes Old Blue.” 

The car I had inherited from my grandfather was named Old Blue because right before it was passed to me, he had taken it to MACCO to get the $99 paint job and he chose the color baby blue.  

It wasn’t macho that I was feeling at that moment, however. It wasn’t even embarrassment. It was actually something just a little short of terror. 

What was wrong with this car? What had I done? 

My mind starts racing:

• Did I forget to change the oil?

• Had I blown the engine?

• Did I put the wrong kind of gas in the tank?

All of this, however, was secondary. My SUPER FEAR was that my dad was going to kill me.

Not literally, of course, but that feeling came from somewhere.  Probably because I was a first hand witness when my brother wrecked my dad's prize Cadillac by speeding and hitting something that almost tore the transmission out of the car. My brother is still alive, but at the time, none of us was sure that was going to be true for very long. 

You see, my dad was a really kind and loving person. He would do anything for anyone at any time. I can remember going and fixing people’s hot water heaters after supper on a Saturday night. I can remember going and helping his friends build their houses. I can remember my dad going and helping my friend Brad’s dad work on his 1972 Pinto (Ekkkk), in which I was a passenger many a time in the back seat (If you don’t know this reference, just google Ford Pinto).

Alongside this positive trait of his was a strong sense of responsibility. If he told me to do something, I had better do it. While he didn’t use the words, he expected it to be done with excellence. The goal for my dad was that my brother and I would grow up to be responsible men. I think that gene still gets expressed in my work today. 

Awfulizing

This is probably my first recollection of the experience of awfulizing. Awfulizing is the term I give to describe when something goes wrong and the event, which normally isn’t too bad in reality, all of a sudden becomes a catastrophe. 

Here is how it works:

• All of a sudden, out of nowhere, my car won’t go over 35mph.

• I probably forgot to change the oil.

• Without an oil change the engine will blow up.

• When the engine blows up, I will have destroyed my car.

• This was my grandfather’s car and a gift to me to care for.

• If I don’t care for this car, I will be seen as irresponsible.

• My dad is going to kill me.

• I saw him almost kill my brother.

So what do I do?

This is the point where emotion takes over from reality. This emotion can cause me to be afraid of the wrong thing.  Can I stop this awfulizing so that I can think more rationally?

Turns out, psychologists have actually studied this phenomenon. What happens is that our feeling of anxiety doesn’t have an ability to create probabilities. For example, based upon the situation of my car not going over 35mph, there is a 10% chance my dad will actually be upset. And there is a 15% probability that I forgot to change the oil. 

My brain, when my car won’t go over 35mph, becomes anxious. My brain can’t rationalize that there is almost no chance the reason that this car won’t go faster is because I missed an oil change. My brain associated car problems with my lack of knowledge (or memory), and created the short term anxious feeling.  

Turns out what anxiety can do is build on itself. Something small can become something quite large in our minds quickly.  

• That report that was due yesterday has you being fired.

• That bill you forgot to pay has you in bankruptcy.

• That customer you forgot to call is now closing their account.

• Forgetting to change the oil right after the 5000th mile has your engine blowing up.

We awfulize. We make a mountain out of a molehill, as my grandma used to say. Our emotions have a way of making something quite small into something quite large...neither of which is actually real.

The Rest of the Story

Turns out, there was a mechanical issue with the car.  As you already guessed, it had nothing to do with the engine or the oil or anything else that I was worried about. The timing chain had broken and the transmission wouldn’t shift out of second gear. Not a big deal, really. About a $140 dollar repair back in the day. 

The Remedy

I want to acknowledge something here up front. There are people who are under the care of a physician who have clinical anxiety. If that is you or a loved one, I pray your mental health professionals are helping to get the relief that you need.

For the rest of us, who tend to awfulize more than we want to admit, I want to give you a couple of practical tools that I use in my executive coaching practice when my clients are in an awfulizing mode.

1. Practice good self-care.  There is no substitute for lowering these stressful moments like prevention. Just like changing the oil in the car can keep the engine from blowing in the future, so can taking care of yourself. This prevention might not take the awfulizing away completely, but it can lessen its effects and frequency.

   1. Get 7-8 hours of sleep.

   2. Eat a balanced, nutritious diet.

   3. Get some weight bearing exercise.

   4. Practice Relaxing.

   5. Work on deepening your spiritual practice.

2. Implement the acronym STOP.  This method is a process that can help you get your thinking mind back. The first step has you Stop from the awfulizing and disconnect from the emotion in the moment. Take a deep breath. Become Other person focused. Finding someone who needs your empathy is the idea. Propose a question and reframe your circumstances. 

3. Report the facts.  Take the temporary feeling of anxiety that has your underwear in a bundle and just report the facts. Not the inflammatory facts that you want them to be, just the facts of the situation.

Had I known any strategies like the ones above, I likely could have saved myself hours of emotional turmoil. Why did it take me over 50 years to learn to just relax? It is all going to be okay. Deal with the facts as they are, try and resolve the issue at hand, stop trying to be so perfect, and just enjoy being yourself.  Come on, Scott...You Got This!

2 Helpful Tools for Improving Team Health

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

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

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

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

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

My Story

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

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

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

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

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

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

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

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

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

Does Conflict Have to Feel like a 4 Letter Word?

CONFLICT.

It is not literally a “4 letter word,” but in organizations sometimes it feels twice as bad as any four-letter word ever would.

Conflict is one of those tense words that can have such a negative connotation. So averse that we avoid it like we would have during the heart of the COVID Pandemic if someone in the grocery store was not wearing a mask when it was required.

It is like the conversation you know you need to have with someone, but you go the other way because avoidance seems, at the time, to be much less painful than the interaction.

But is it? What is behind this avoidance? 

This is the generation of “when you see something, say something.” I think that mantra is pretty easy to articulate in isolation, like when you are hiding behind your Facebook or Instagram page. But, putting all the social pressures we feel in organizations on top of it and avoiding conflict can seem like a better route than addressing it.

What if the person I am in conflict with gets hurt? Worse yet, what if I get hurt?

Rather than face the hurt or the pain, our knee-jerk response is often to avoid it. Just like the person in the grocery store who was not wearing a mask during the Pandemic, our first thought was not the fact that it is unlikely they have COVID, rather, we probably chose to avoid them altogether. There is over a 90% chance that all is well, but we become paralyzed by the prospect of the pain, so we avoid and miss all the great opportunities that could have been present if we just engaged.

Conflict and Emotional Intelligence

I was working with a team of folks a few years back whose senior leadership team was trying to address the fact that their business was being held back because everyone in the company was so nice to each other. 

I actually see this a lot with the organizations I work with. They are great people. Highly professional. And rightly so, in our organizations, it has become the right thing to do to treat employees well, and with respect.

A goal in developing organizations is to try and understand what the people need and to try and meet those needs. We hear a lot these days about how to engage employees; making sure they are enjoying their work has become a metric for performance. That is all well and good, except if we are not careful we can over-index the relationships to the extent that problems will go unsolved.

It is interesting to me the relationship between “Interpersonal Relationships” and “Decision-Making”, specifically the problem-solving aspect of a decision-making process. 

First, let me define my terms:

Interpersonal Relationships between people are mutually satisfying relationships that are characterized by trust and compassion. 

Problem-Solving is the ability to find solutions for problems where emotions are involved (which is every problem) and how the emotions impact the decision.

Here is what it looked like for the client I mentioned above:

The organization had a culture of caring about people. The experience was very much like being in a family. By in large, they all are really nice people. They trust each other and show a tremendous amount of care and compassion. They have strong interpersonal relationships. 

So when a deadline came…(and went)… for a project to be delivered, it created a problem. Other teams would be waiting for the work that was now missing. What ensued is what I called “tension smiles”. You can feel the tension of the missed deadline, all the while smiling as if nothing was wrong. 

The emotion about the problem was high. The relationships were trusting.

The issue became that the folks in the organization saw the choice they had as either stressing the relationship OR solving the problem. What I heard was, “If I confront Sam for missing the deadline, then I will lose trust with him.”  

From their perspective, the choice was between preserving the relationship OR the solving problem - not both.

This is common when it comes to conflict. The tension and the emotion affect our ability to see things clearly. We fall into fear-based thinking that blinds us. Instead of seeing the full picture, fear causes us to see very few options in front of us.

The Strategy 

A simple hack when you feel you are facing this dichotomy is to change your “OR” to an “AND”.

How can the manager in the above scenario have both strong interpersonal relationships and solve the problem at hand?

Understanding where Sam is coming from AND holding him accountable for missing the deadline are both possible by flexing your empathy muscle; empathy for Sam as well as for the people impacted by his missing the deadline. 

Our emotions will, at times, not tell us the truth.

It will feel like I must pick one option over the other; such as the relationship over solving the problem. This is the “false” in a false dichotomy.  

Your emotion, your fear, and your anxiety are all telling you something, but what they are telling you gets misinterpreted.  

Your emotion is telling you that there is tension. The question your emotion is asking you is “What do you want to do about this?”  

Emotions can’t decide. All they can do is inform.

It is up to your more rational, thinking brain to make the decision. In order to do this, it is key when you feel the fear or the anxiety in the false dichotomy of the choice to take a deep breath. Step back for a moment and see if you can find a way to solve the problem AND maintain the relationship.

Change your “OR” to an “AND”.

Hold Sam accountable AND maintain the relationship.  

The Secret to Self-Reflection

A while back I had a conversation with a young man who was interested in applying for his first leadership role. This young soul recounted all of his accomplishments to me: bonuses earned, awards won, and recognition given to him by his organization for his outstanding performance.

As he continued to try and convince me that he was ready to take this next step, I sat back and thought, “why is he trying to persuade me?”

The Conversation Was Quite One-Sided and Seemed Self-Aggrandizing.

As I continued to reflect during the conversation, my thoughts turned and I realized… he was not trying to convince me, he was trying to convince himself. Even though he had received rewards and recognition, he knew in his heart of hearts that he was not ready. His peers were being promoted around him, and this caused him to take on their call as his own.

My role as a coach was not to judge whether he was ready, my role was to help him explore his reality so that he could make informed decisions about his own life. After he stopped talking, we ate in silence. A long and very uncomfortable pause ensued, and I could tell he was starting to get uncomfortable. “You're not ready,” I said. My intention was not to judge him, but rather to shock his ignition and get him thinking.

He immediately became defensive. "What do you mean I am not ready?" he said. Immediately, he launched into his list of accomplishments once again. I let him go on until it seemed he was out of breath. When he finished I said, “You have all the WHAT you need. You have all of your individual contributions. You have shown your skill and capability. I think you might be missing the HOW.”

“What Do You Mean by the How?” He Asked.

I turned to one of my favorite modern-day philosophers, Parker J. Palmer, who wrote, “I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it, but to embrace all of it.”

My young friend was still trying to embrace all of his strengths as an individual contributor. He was still selling to himself the idea that these attributes were enough for him to lead others.

He was also not being completely honest with himself or in his description of his accomplishments. He was grandstanding, and frankly, it made me uncomfortable just listening to it.

So I asked him, “Would you tell me about a time when you worked on a project that did not succeed?” Long silence again. I could tell he was stuck.

The thinking in his head must have been like a game of chess, calculating his next best move: “If I tell him about an unsuccessful project then I admit failure and that looks bad, but if I don’t tell him anything then I look arrogant and that looks bad, too.” I could see the thoughts rolling around in his head like a pair of dice being shaken just before being jettisoned in a game of Craps. I interjected, "You see, what Palmer is saying is that you have to know your whole self. We all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. Until you are ready to embrace your weaknesses, I don’t think you are ready to lead. Begin to think about HOW you accomplished your work, then frame your story around that.”

My Morning Reflection

Many of you know that I try to spend my mornings in quiet reflection and meditation prior to starting my day. Many days I will do some type of scripture reading to accompany this reflection. I love it when the topic of my reflection shows up later in my day. The day of the above conversation was such a day.

Prior to my talk with this young leader, my quiet meditation had been on the story of Moses. When I think of Moses, I cannot help but think of the Charleston Heston caricature in the movie The 10 Commandments. In my mental picture, Moses is standing on the rock, staff held overhead, as the wind and clouds swirl around him and the Red Sea in front of him splits open like a zipper separating two sides of a jacket. Powerful, in control, strong, mighty….Moses.

However, my study that morning showed a different side of the biblical character. God is having a conversation with Moses trying to convince him that he is the guy to lead the Hebrew people out of slavery. Moses, who had been raised as the son of an Egyptian Pharaoh, felt self-righteous enough as a young man to kill an Egyptian and vindicate a fellow Hebrew. Rather than face the conflict of what he had done, he ran from that life to be a shepherd - a bit of a nomad in the wilderness. Forty years later, Moses encounters God in a burning bush. God says he wants Moses to go and lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt. Moses’s reply is so classic, “Who am I?"

According to Dr. Ken Boa, this question revealed a radical change in Moses, from radical impulsive youth to a middle-aged man feeling inadequate for the task. Moses had come to grips with the totality of his humanity, from knowledge of his strengths to understanding the depth of his weakness.

This level of self-knowledge is what Palmer calls “embracing one's wholeness." It is this wholeness that allows a leader to balance their strengths and weaknesses, their confidence and self-assurance, along with empathy and compassion.

Self-Regard: The Ability to Respect and Accept Yourself.

Essentially, self-regard involves liking yourself the way you are. This competency ensures the leader has enough self-confidence that others would want to follow. That his/her self-worth is balanced with enough empathy that the leader is going to be able to get through good times and bad.

Eleanor Roosevelt is famous for saying, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." People who have positive self-regard have a real sense of identity and work to overcome feelings of inadequacy or inferiority.

In order to lead others, you must have enough confidence to lead yourself. Then, you must have enough empathy to realize that leadership is not about your identity, but your relationships with your followers that matter.

Appreciate your positive qualities, and accept your limitations. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Learn to like yourself, “warts and all.” After all, if you don’t, why should they?

Reflection Question: What value would it provide for you to understand your strengths, and what would it feel like for you to embrace your weaknesses?

Happy Memorial Day 2022

A memorial is an object which serves as a remembrance focusing us on something from our past, either personal or historical.

Oftentimes this object is physical, such as a flag, a piece of stone, or a shape like a cross or a star. The physical object serves as a trigger for us to stop, even if just for a moment, to remember. This object interrupts our thinking and causes us to momentarily think of something different.

Sometimes the object is a day. Like today, for instance. Where we pause from our regular flow of activity and do something different.

Memorials take us out of our routine and cause us to do things differently.

If we just keep on doing what we have always done, then the memorial really is not having much of an effect on us.

Today, can we all just slow down a bit and think? Maybe think about something from your past. Maybe think about an interaction you had with someone, and how good it was. Or, if it was not so good, what could you have done differently to make it better?

I think this is the real challenge of memorials, exemplified in the United States as Memorial Day. Are we willing to stop and really examine ourselves and how we are behaving?

It is easy to see how others are impacting us. It is much harder to see the impact we are having on those around us. Yet this is the real purpose of memorials.

My wife spoke with a friend not too long ago. The friend was recalling an encounter she had with another old friend, let’s call her Sally. As the story goes, the conversation between these two friends drifted to the topic of COVID vaccinations. My wife’s friend is a Physician’s Assistant and believes in COVID vaccinations, and has taken the vaccines. Sally, however, had an opposite view...such an opposite view that Sally said to my wife’s friend, “I guess this means that we can not be friends.”

What has this world come to?

Have we really lost the ability to think critically?

What I mean by critical thinking is the ability to challenge our own points of view. Assuming that what our particular news stream is feeding us is absolute truth...to the point we would abandon friendships. Have we really lost the ability to empathize with others to the point that we don’t care at all to see things from their point of view? Have we become so lazy that we are unwilling to do the work to understand where someone else might be coming from?

One of the things that really makes the United States stand out in this world is our ability to speak freely. I actually think as a country we are pretty good at this. But, we need to work on listening.

Why not ask some curious questions to others about why they think what they think rather than just rudely assuming if they have an opposite view from you that they are wrong? At the end of the day, no one says you have to agree, but at least you will have a better understanding of where they are coming from.

Memorials serve as guideposts for behaviors, personally and for society. These objects really are a time for us to step back and reflect on who we are and where we are headed. They give us an opportunity to remember all the good and all the bad and to put perspective on each of these.

My hope for you this Memorial Day is that you have the ability to pause and reflect. In this reflection, if someone has an opposing view to yours, I hope you will spend the time to be curious about where they are coming from, rather than having that knee-jerk reaction to defend your position.

Perhaps the real work here is to just listen and be curious without having to even share your point of view. Let's all work this Memorial Day on our listening skills, rather than sharing our opinions.

May we demonstrate the ability to understand the other person's perspective before we automatically go to war with them over something. May God help us all as we try and find some kindness, compassion, and understanding in our approach to our fellow man.

Happy Memorial Day!

Is It Too Late to Restart My Goals for This Year?

We are almost halfway through the year! Time flies. How are you doing with the goals you set earlier this year? Have you accomplished them or have you gotten off track? It’s not uncommon for people to not want to review their goals, especially if they know they have not made the progress they hoped for. The feeling of discouragement can become overwhelming when we see a lack of progress and know we aren't where we had hoped to be by now when the goal was originally set.

In January, you set your goals for the new year. Let's say you wanted to exercise three days a week for an hour. This goal is like getting on an airplane. You are all buckled in your seat and ready for take-off. You know the goal. It is written down and you feel comfortable with where you are going.

The plane starts down the runway, shakes, and surges as it gains speed. All of a sudden, it is February. You likely have taken a couple of steps toward goal attainment. You are gaining speed and you can feel the inertia of the plane starting to lift off. In regard to your goal, maybe you called around to see what gym would best fit your needs. You went out and bought new exercise clothes and maybe some shoes. The feeling and speed of the change felt good.

Then comes March. The plane reaches 30,000 feet, the seatbelt sign comes off, and the plane levels out, and the exercise doldrums set in. You no longer feel the rush of take-off. You no longer can sense the speed of the plane. This is when goal attainment becomes difficult. When it feels like you are not making any progress at all.

The Feeling Is Not Real

The interesting thing to me is the lie our emotions give us in this context. While the positive “dopamine” feeling of starting something new may be gone, the important thing to realize is that the plane is still going 450 miles an hour, even though you can’t feel it. You are still moving. You are still experiencing progress. Even though half of the year is gone and we have said goodbye to March, April, and soon May, YOU are still flying. Realize your plane is in the air. You have not crashed. YOU HAVE NOT FAILED!

Instead of assuming that you are way off track and that you've already failed, step back and look at your goal objectively.

Is It a S-M-A-R-T Goal?

Most likely you've heard the acronym “SMART” and even used it when setting goals, but it is a helpful tool to check up on your goals or even get to help you get back on track.

• S: Was It Specific? When getting specific with your goal, consider why and how you want to achieve it and not merely the definition of your goal. Perhaps you want to work on developing young leaders. Your “why” might be because your want to prepare them for more responsibility in the future and your “how” will be through professional development workshops or one-on-one mentoring sessions.

• M: Was It Measurable? Are you able to see where you are right now and where you'll end up? If you are not able to track the progress of obtaining the goal along the way, you'll have a hard time seeing if you succeeded in the end or staying motivated along the way.

• A-R: Was It Achievable and Realistic? The A and R in our acronym go hand in hand. When you figure out your goal, how to do it, and its deadline, you have to think about the parameters and circumstances that will make it possible. At this point, something may have come up in the last 6 months that have changed your circumstance and deterred your goal. That's okay. Life happens. Instead of seeing it as a failure or no longer attainable, just think about what changes need to be made to your goal, the plan, or the timeline. Don't be tempted to start from scratch, instead, make less work for yourself by simply re-evaluating and tweaking what's already in progress and then steer it back on track.

• T: Was it Time-bound? Some of you may have set goals that you've already completed. Others might feel the pressure of time ticking away. Use the time as positive pressure to get the work done, not to stress you out. If you feel constrained, give yourself a break and allow yourself more time. If it's a project with a deadline, reach out to your team or manager and see how you can work together to get it completed. Also, consider how you are using your time and what could be distracting you from focusing on your goal? What do you need to implement personally to give yourself more time and focus to achieve this goal?

Most importantly, remember the WHY behind your goal and the reasons that motivated you to set the goal in the first place. Visualize what it will look like for you and your team when that goal is accomplished. Grab a coach or mentor and share with them your SMART goal. Listen to any advice they have for you.

Be encouraged by the progress you have made so far. Keep yourself in the air and land that goal safely on the ground. You still have 6 months!

A Surprising Thing About Coaching

Surprise is an interesting emotion! Unlike disgust, which always carries a negative theme, and happiness, which emotes such a positive feeling. 

Surprise is an emotion that can go either way, positive or negative, and can shift from negative to positive in the blink of an eye.

Here is what I mean:

“Surprise, you are getting a raise!” Unexpected and positive. How fun!

“Surprise, we are downsizing and your services are no longer needed.” Unexpected and not so fun.

I can even recall when my wife Kim told me we were going to have our third child around 27 years ago…”Surprise, I am pregnant!” I think were her words. 

“Holy Crap!” Unexpected and a feeling of fear, replaced in a nanosecond by the feeling of overwhelming joy. “Really, that is amazing!” followed by an unexplainable feeling of love and closeness with my spouse.

Surprise has a way of intensifying our other emotions.  According to Ingred Fatell Lee, author of the book Joyful: The Surprising Power Of Ordinary Things To Create Extraordinary Happiness, surprise acts like a magnifying glass for joy by giving the tiny pleasure heightened significance.

Surprise is one of the six primary emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman and is so necessary as a human because it can quickly divert our attention from one thing to another. Surprise is a kind of a warning signal to say “Hey, pay attention to this new thing, that other thing you were concentrating on needs to be deprioritized and this new thing needs some focus.”

Surprise ranges in intensity from amazement to a mild distraction.  

I Was Surprised

I was recently having a conversation with a friend who was trying to get a better idea of what my coaching business was all about.

“Tell me what you do again?” he asked.

“I help people get an idea of what their leadership looks like,” I told him.  “By using some assessments, and interviewing people they interact with, I give them a mosaic of what their leadership looks like. I then come alongside them and help them make any changes they see in their approach.  In a nutshell, that is what I do.”

“And they pay you for that?” He said to me, rather surprised!  “Sounds like you get paid to be people’s friend.”

Interestingly, I had just read an interesting and quite provocative article by Christopher Shelly titled “A Friend Officiated Our Wedding And Now My Husband’s Dead.” (Isn’t that title a bit surprising?)

Here is a link to the article if you are interested A Friend Officiated Our Wedding And Now My Husband’s Dead. It is about a 4-minute read but in case you don’t want to click through, here are the highlights…

To save money this couple….

• Hires a fried to do their wedding. It is a disaster, but they save money.

• Hires a friend to cater the reception. It is a disaster, but they save money.

• Hires a friend to fix the transmission in their car. It is a disaster but they save money.

• Hire a friend to do open heart surgery on her new husband….

I think you can see where this is going.

I heard Dave Ramsey, the author of Total Money Makeover, say one time, “If you own a $200 car then you can afford to try and fix it yourself. If you own a $20,000 car then you probably should have a professional work on it.”

Can you coach people in your own organization? Sure you can! And I would even argue that a culture of coaching in an organization is a very positive thing. 

But, when you need a professional, hire one. 

Reacting vs. Humble Inquiry

Sometimes, I feel like I have just been talked AT.  No dialogue. No asking my perspective. One descriptor said that it feels like their boss has come into their office and said, “Do this, think this way, shut up, and go there!" There is a lot of talking AT people going on these days. No one seems to be listening.

It feels like no one has any time to listen to anyone anymore at all. We have all become experts in our own minds over the past couple of years on mRNA technology, vaccines, statistical curve flattening, etc…even though very few of us have even taken a calculus class to know what flattening a curve really means...or is it statistics?

If you are not sure, then I have made my point!  We read one article from the Washington Post written by a journalist whose editor is politically tied to a party and we count that article as completely factual. So, there is not much thinking going on these days either. Just a whole lot of people running around REACTING..

I Get it. Sort of.

At the end of our block when I was 10 years old,  there was this old house that was probably built in the early 1900s. It had been condemned by the health department with a clear sign posted on the door: DANGER KEEP OUT: BUILDING CONDEMNED.

All the kids in the neighborhood had been told by their parents to not go near that house. My dad was a construction guy and he sat me down and told me about the rusty nails that would be sticking out of the floorboards, and how the front porch was unsettled to the point it could collapse at any moment. He also seemed to be concerned that rats or some other wild animal could have taken up residence inside, as the house was nestled up against a heavily wooded area.  

At one time,  I bet this house was pretty cool. Probably the talk of the town, two stories with a pillar-supported front porch. It was about 1/2 mile from the Illinois River and sat up high enough on the hill that on a clear day you could easily see the river and likely all the way across.

But time had taken its toll on the place. We had lived in the neighborhood for three years and my grandparents had lived there for at least 20. My grandad couldn’t remember the last time someone lived in the home. No one knew for sure who owned it. The entire place was a real mystery.

But for us kids in the neighborhood, the house was one thing… haunted. That meant it was ripe for exploring as soon as one of us in the group mustered up enough courage to suggest we go poke around and see what might be inside. That kid was named Bobby.  He wasn’t a real leader for the group unless it was for things that were sure to get us all in trouble, in which case Bobby was pretty good at that. It might have been Bobby’s idea, but you really can’t blame a group of ten-year-old boys for just wanting an adventure on an otherwise hot, boring summer day, can you? What? You don’t think it is a good idea either?

Well neither did my mom nor my dad. I got two doses of the lecture on that day after my mom got the call from a man named Mr. Thompson. And then again after my dad got home and my mom told him about the phone call with Mr. Thompson. 

Reacting

Boy, could my mom lecture. This one went about half an hour from what I recall, complete with volume, tone, and pitch as she explained to me the dangers of our exploration. She mentioned words like tetanus and trespassing, neither of which would have meant anything at all to me even if they were delivered without volume, tone, or pitch. We didn’t have internet then, so I couldn’t quickly look it up to see what tetanus meant, I just had to take mom’s word for it. She was the expert. What she decided was true…and was what we went with. If this lecture was a court of law, mom was both the prosecutor and the judge. Where was Bobby when I needed him?

And the verdict…Guilty! (Before I even had the chance to take the stand.)

Mr. Thompson was a truck driver who just happened to be home that day between hauls and saw us poking around. He called all our parents. Mr. Thompson was an otherwise nice guy, a bit nosey perhaps, but a nice guy. However, in my case, he was an eyewitness. I was doomed. His credibility was impeccable. 

Of course, I denied it, but I have to give mom credit. As a prosecutor she was good. “Why would Mr. Thompson lie about that…why would he even care if it was not true?”I had no response. I thought about attacking Mr. Thompson’s character. Probably good impulse control at that point. Had I said anything at that point it would have for sure been held against me.

The penalty…Grounded! Crap. Grounding was the worst.

“Mom, couldn’t you just beat me?” (This was a legitimate form of punishment 50 years ago!) My logic was that although a beating would hurt, it would end, and then it was over. Grounding a 10-year-old boy was painful torture meant for thieves and murderers.  Really what that meant was that I was home and in the house when dad got home. Crap. Beating and grounding. That is not fair or just. 

The thing was, from my perspective, no one seemed to care about me. I swear the only thing my parents cared about was what the neighbors might think if they saw me in that old house. Or what if the police came…what then? I could have gotten arrested. Worse yet, the neighbors would see the police in our driveway. I think my mom would have rather me just be arrested.

Not to mention all the potential health risks or physical danger if something happened like the roof collapsing on me. I can still hear Dad saying "You know the pillars that support the weight of that roof could just collapse and then you would be crushed?”

You have to know one thing. I really love my parents. My dad has been gone for over 20 years now and I miss him a lot. What I wouldn’t give to get a lecture on how to best protect myself from the dangers that lurk around every corner. Most of the time my mom and dad were actually pretty good listeners…except when they reacted with angry or scared emotions.

Humble Inquiry

There are a lot of people running around right now angry and scared.

People are angry that they still have to come to work at the office, while others work from home.

People who had to furlough are scared because they have house payments, car payments, insurance payments, and utility payments, and they had no margin in their lives even when they had full incomes. 

When people are scared or angry they can get all kinds of emotionally unsettled. I really love the concept Edgar Schein wrote about a number of years ago called Humble Inquiry. If you are a regular blog reader you will know this book is a favorite of mine. The subtitle is what is really brilliant: “The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling.”

When people get all fired up angry or scared they stop thinking and just start reacting. As a leader, you need good impulse control and not to react back at them at that moment.  What I coach leaders to do in this instance is to practice some “humble inquiry” vs. reacting.

1. Minimize your own preconceptions. You are about to get curious about someone who is scared. Clear your mind and shift from judging to observing. 

2. Keep your questions for them open-ended. You want to explore with the scared person what is it that is really scaring them. 

3. Practice giving up control of the conversation. You are not trying to lead them anywhere specific. You are there to just help them process what they are experiencing.

What might it be like if we all just got a little more curious about where folks are coming from these days? They may not ever tell you the real reason they are scared, but they will remember you as an excellent listener, if you practice some humble inquiry vs. reacting.

4 Strategies to Prevent Burnout

I'm trying a little something new today and I have recorded a short video for you to enjoy in place of my usual written blog. Click below to check it out:

Additional blog posts that are related to burnout are listed here:

• One Easy Way to Avoid Burnout as a Leader

• 3-Step Recipe for a Productivity Reset

• Are You Dealing Effectively With Emotional Exhaustion?

As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Thank you for reading and listening!

When Negative Self-Talk Creeps In

Years ago, a good friend of mine, Ken (also an avid reader and commenter on this blog), submitted my name as a speaker for an organization he is affiliated with. He emailed me asking if I would consider giving a talk and facilitating a dialogue on the value of emotional intelligence (EI).

I am always humbled when anyone thinks that I might have something valuable to say when it comes to EI. It is one of my favorite subjects to talk about, and I often use the EQi 2.0 Assessment in training programs I do and almost every coaching client I work with does a self-assessment that shows them what their leadership habits may appear like to others. The next certification program is coming up in June, and you can learn more and register online here.

Now, here is what you need to know about Ken. His job is to serve as a hospice chaplain in Polk County Florida. His request was for me to come and speak to a group of his peers and his boss on the subject of how EI can be of value to a hospital chaplain.

Gulp! I have to admit, the email produced mixed feelings in me. Like I said above, I was humbled, but scared out of my pants as well. Hospice chaplains...really?! While I might know something about EI, my immediate knee-jerk reaction was, I don’t know anything about hospice chaplains!

Then the negative self-talk started to creep in:

• You’re no expert in hospice care.

• What do you know about how to fit EI into their world?

• You have never even studied EI in this context, what if there is no data?

• You are not a very good public speaker.

• Maybe you should call him up and back out.

Am I the only one this happens with? When you are hit with a complex, tension-filled situation what do you do? Do you immediately become filled with fear, anxiety, and self-doubt? How do you stop the negative self-talk from creeping in and taking over your thinking?

Here is a quick and easy method that I use when this happens to me: I use an acronym I call "STOP." It is a four-step method that helps me turn my negative thinking into a more positive and constructive use of my time and energy.

STOP:

S = Stop: Do something to interrupt the cycle of negative thinking.

T = Take a deep breath: Breathing relaxes your tension, releases dopamine, and calms you down to think more clearly.

O = Other focused: Exercise empathy and become curious about what it is like to be in the other person's shoes.

P = Purpose a question: Asking questions can have a calming effect and bring you more into a zone of safety than one of fear.

Here is how the STOP model helped me get rid of the negative thinking and increase my confidence in this situation:

When I first noticed the negative thinking creeping into my mind with the thought, you’re no expert in hospice, I should have taken the time to put this model into effect. Unfortunately, even though I teach this stuff, I got all the way down to, maybe you should call him and back out before I put this into practice.

S = Stop: Psychologists call this pattern interrupt. I noticed the negative thinking and I did something physical to draw attention away from the negative thought. In this case, I was sitting down when I read the email. When I finally noticed the negativity, I stood up. I concentrated on doing something different. Distract yourself away from the source of negativity.

T = Take a deep breath: When I stood up, I took several yoga-style breaths. Focused on bringing my belly button to my spine. I actually could feel myself starting to calm down. This is often when I will also say a prayer, asking God for wisdom as I navigate these treacherous negative waters. I distracted myself from the negativity for a moment. That is the goal of this step.

O = Other Focused: I tried to take the thoughts off of myself and my shortcomings. I put my thoughts onto Ken and his team instead. I began to think, what might they need from a model like emotional intelligence? What value could it bring them? Notice the questions starting to form when I start to turn my thinking from self-referential to other-focused.

P = Purpose a question: I crafted an email back to Ken asking him, what are some common situations that hospital chaplains find themselves in where they need more EI? What had other speakers done that the chaplains found valuable? How had he used EI in his work as a hospice chaplain?

I noticed, then, that my fear and anxiety were dissipating into curiosity. I was moving from a lack of self-consciousness into a state of confidence by focusing on the value I could bring to this group of dedicated servants.

Self-Actualization and Optimism

According to authors Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book, Emotional Intelligence always exists in balance. This is pretty easy to see when we think about a leader who is very self-confident but lacks any empathy or interpersonal ability. We often put a label on a leader who has this balance of qualities as being someone who is arrogant at best, and a real narcissist on the more clinical side of the psychology.

In my case, I am usually a fairly self-perceptive person. This means that in part, I get a lot of meaning and purpose out of my life and the work I do. This is a real strength for me.

Most of the time I am optimistic, which means I have a positive outlook on the future and am fairly resilient in the face of setbacks. However, this ability can come into question, especially when fear or anxiety enter the stage. My optimism can turn into a negative downward spiral of self-critical thinking.

What I need when I am faced with these fears and anxieties is to balance my self-actualization and my waning level of optimism.

The STOP model helps me to put the brakes on the negative thinking, so I can use all the meaning and purpose I get in my life to teach and coach emotional intelligence, regaining my level of optimism.

I am happy to report that Ken and I scheduled a call to talk about what value EI can bring to the hospice chaplains.

Homework:

Where do fear and anxiety creep into your leadership?

Can you anticipate when these events occur?

When you feel your thoughts going negative, try using the STOP model to see if it can bring you back into emotional balance.

Get certified with us!

Learning About Social Responsibility

This past Saturday morning I had the opportunity to attend a memorial walk for my neighbor, Bill.  He passed away about a month ago after a battle with lung cancer.  Bill was 80 years old and if you would have asked him, which I had the opportunity to do, he would have told you he lived a rich and meaningful life. 

Everybody in the neighborhood knew Bill. He made it a point. Bill is the kind of guy who would look around and move toward you like a heat-seeking missile. 

Bill Was Socially Responsible

I have no idea if he recycled or cared about global warming. He didn’t drive an electric car and he never talked about things like boycotting Nike because of child labor practices.

He did not do any of the typical things, that I know of, that we would relate to as being socially responsible. What he did do though was bring a smile to people's faces. He had what we call in the emotional intelligence world “Social Responsibility”.

A Socially Responsible leader is one who has a social consciousness and is generally a helpful person. At a deeper level, these leaders are willing to contribute to society and show concern for the community that they are a part of. This was Bill! 

He was a leader in our little neighborhood without being on the Homeowners Association board or being chair of any committees. Bill was a leader because he had tremendous Social Responsibility. 

Bill Cared

When I first met him, about six years ago, he was a jogger. He would jog six miles every morning. Never in a hurry. Always at his own pace. More importantly, he stopped along his run and talked to everyone. I mean everyone! He talked to all the neighbors walking their dogs. He talked to all the folks who clean the swimming pools and mowed the lawns. He talked to the heating and air-conditioning repair people, and the workers fixing roofs.

He would tell me often that if I ever needed work done at the house, to just ask him. He had all the best contractors scoped out. He would say after a 30+ year career at General Motors he was pretty adept at deciphering who really knew their stuff and who to stay away from.

My wife used to tell Bill that she was praying for him and his response was classic. He would tell her, “Kim, you keep praying, I need all the points I can get.”  With all the good Bill did, it always seemed he was looking for a way to do even more for others.

As far as I know, none of you who regularly read these posts ever met Bill. That does not mean we cannot learn from him.

Developing Your Social Responsibility

When thinking about developing ourselves as leaders, it is always good to have a benchmark set of competencies to use as guiding principles. Let's think about Social Responsibility for a moment and think about what goes into a leader who is Socially Responsible.

Social responsibility is that moral compass directing your behavior toward promoting the greater good and contributing to society and one’s social groups. 

A moral compass relates to the values a leader holds and informs their ethical decision-making.  It is the beliefs, objectives, and judgments that a leader holds when it comes to something being right or wrong. 

The English word moral is derived from the Latin “mos” or “moris” which refers to “conduct” or “a way of life”. For leaders, morality is a set of culturally transmitted standards of right and wrong. In order for leaders to be able to do the right thing, they must have objective standards to rely upon. Without these standards, the leader can do whatever they wish, for whoever they wish.

The Rabi In Heaven

There is an old story told about a small town in Eastern Europe. In this village the people were very poor, the Rabi was very holy, and the skeptics were very doubting. 

The poor people believed that on the Jewish New Year their Rabi went up to heaven to intercede on their behalf. They needed to eke out a living for the next year and they had hopes for good health and that their children would have good matches when they married.

One New Year’s Day, one of the skeptics decided to hide and watch the Rabi. The skeptic was convinced that the Rabi did not go to heaven and was just deceiving the people. So the skeptic hid under the bed of the Rabi. He watched him dress in the morning, putting on boots, a sturdy belt, and a heavy woolen shirt. Then the Rabi picked up an Axe. 

At this point, the skeptic was sure he was discovered and that the Rabi was going to kill him. But the Rabi slipped the Axe into his belt and walked deep into the forest. When the skeptic caught up to him he found the Rabi chopping down trees and organizing them into big logs, smaller branches, and twigs. He then took off his heavy wool shirt and put the wood on it and drug it even further into the woods where there was a small cabin.

The Rabi knocked on the door and an elderly woman answered. “Who is it?”, the woman asked. “It is Ivan the woodcutter,” The Rabi told her.  He had brought firewood because he heard that she had been sick and the winter was very cold. 

At daybreak, when the Jews went to synagogue they encountered the skeptic. One said to him, “Well, last night our Rabi went to heaven and surely next year will be better for us. But you do not believe us do you?”

Quietly, the skeptic said, “Yes I do. He indeed went to heaven and maybe even higher. In fact, I saw him do it.”*

The Lesson I Learned From Bill

Concern for others promotes healthy relationships. Neighborhoods and societies function more effectively when individuals help each other. The world is a better place when we take the time to just get to know each other.

There is a lot of pain and suffering in our world today. Would the world be a better place if we all just went on a neighborhood walk and got to know each other?

I think Bill would advocate for this.

Bill, Rest In Peace.

*This story was adapted from Ethics in the Workplace by Craig E Johnson.

Freaking Out! What Emotional Intelligence Has to Do With It

To me, “freaking out” is one of those concepts that is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

Here are some examples I have observed over the last few weeks:

• A man at the grocery store “freaked out” when the lady in front of him just got the last BOGO special on the baby-back ribs.

• Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars!

• Two guys in sports cars pulled over to duke it out for some reason.

• A mom is in her car, picking her kid up in the store parking lot, her body is facing the steering wheel and her head is spinning 180 degrees. Only God knows why she was freaking out.

• A colleague calls me in a state of panic, two hours before a big presentation, and is unsure that what we have been working on will be sufficient to reach the intended goal.

• A couple who called into a podcast show I listen to that just sold all of their stock in their 401K at the bottom of the dip because the market went down a couple of days in a row. They lost $300k in value in less than 24 hours!

Data on Freaking Out

I just saw a study that shows this phenomenon of “freaking out” and the impact it can have. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) examined 650,000 investment accounts representing about 300,000 households in 2015. Here are a couple of the interesting findings:

• They counted 36,3774 panic sales by 25,852 household investors (9% of all households), across a period of 13 years between January 2003 and December 2015.

• Of households with at least one panic-selling event, 21,706 of them did so once within our sample period, while 3,081 did so twice.

• The researchers also looked into whether people who freaked out ever came back into the market: 60% came back in 5 months, 10% more came back in 10 months, and 30% never returned to the market at all.

This blog post is not in any way intended to give financial advice. But it is interesting that people who saw the stock market as a good place to get a return on their investment, panicked, lost a significant amount, and then a third of them never returned. The other side note is that those who did return paid more to get back in than if they had just ridden the downturn out. 

Freaking Out

This is what caused them to make bad decisions. When fear and panic set in, we as humans can lose our logical, rational minds. We can do things that if the fear was not present, we would not normally do. No one puts money in the stock market with the intention to lose it.  Rational people put money in the market so they will have more at the end of a certain period than less. And yet in our financial lives, and many other places as well, we become subject to fear and make these decisions. 

Here is a link to the study I mentioned if you are interested in reading it for yourself: When Do Investors Freak Out.

In the emotional intelligence world, we call this ability to remain calm, “Impulse Control”. This is the idea that as leaders we can stay rational in part by having the ability to delay gratification. 

Here is how I imagine this is happening to those folks who called into the financial podcast show above. While I do not know the actual details for these people, I have seen it enough to be able to fill in the blanks of the story.

These folks woke up one morning with let's say $500,000 in a stock market account of some kind. They turn on CNBC and see that the market is down and the talking heads are adding fuel to the fire with mentions of recessions, inverted yield curves, and cryptocurrency. None of which these folks know anything about -  they just put some money in the market and for a couple of years when they woke up they had more than they did the day before. Their feeling was that they were on their way to “easy street”. 

Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, their investment is down. The natural reaction is, “Oh no we must protect what we have left! What if we lose it all?” In the midst of this crisis, they forget to take the toast out of the toaster and to add fuel to the fire, now their breakfast is ruined. 

Their pride starts to get in the way, after all, it was their idea to put the money in the stock market, to begin with. And of course, they took all the credit for the great decisions being made as the market went up. Now they are looking a bit foolish. Their significant other, who is probably equally feeling foolish for supporting their partner’s arrogance and not working very hard to understand what they were doing, says something like, “Maybe we should call someone?”  The other partner barks, “no, what we need to do is sell to prevent our losses.”

And there it is. The instant gratification. If we do something right now, it will feel better.

And when the frenzy is over and they have sold everything, they now have $300,000. Whew! At least they didn’t lose it all. No, but they did lose two years of investing. And when the market rebounded just a few days later, moving to some all-time highs, these folks sat on the sidelines and did not participate in any of the gains. 

Again, I am NOT a financial advisor. I am not intending to tell you in any way what to do with your money or how to use the stock market. 

I am just very interested in the decisions people make and if their ability to control their impulses can help them make better decisions. Let's take a deeper look at this idea of impulse control and how we can have more control over our decision-making. 

Emotional Intelligence and Impulse Control

In the study of emotional intelligence, we call this freaking out - panic or a lack of impulse control. 

It all starts with a set of circumstances or expectations we see as normal (the stock market always going up) and a triggering event that challenges our expectations (the stock market going down fast). Then fear creeps in and starts to make us very concerned about our own safety at the moment (we are going to have to live on poor street instead of easy street). That feeling we get says to us “protect yourself at all cost”. This is the point where if there has not been an intervention, we start to make decisions we likely will regret later. 

When stresses in our lives build up to such a point,  any additional stress can trigger a reaction. This is known as the tipping point or what Dr. Henry Thompson in his book, The Stress Effect, calls the “crazy threshold”. Each time a stressor is encountered, it adds to the overall stress level. Each time a stressor is encountered, it adds to the overall stress amount. As stress mounts, this “crazy threshold” is approached. If something is not done to intervene, and the “crazy threshold” is exceeded, then our thinking mind starts to shut down and we can become almost a completely different person. 

The question is, do we have a choice in terms of how we react, or do we just follow our emotions and justify it as authenticity?

One of the best analogies for impulse control I have heard is that of a gate. Imagine that your ability to control your impulses is a little gate. On one side of the gate are your emotions. Your ability to control your emotions is this gate and on the other side of the gate is your behavior.  

All of your feelings and emotions get stacked up on one side of the gate. Your Impulse Gate puts them on hold; you are aware of your feelings but you don’t always act on them. The Impulse Gate allows you to keep the big picture in mind, your goals, your dreams, and your desires. In the context of social functioning, we can not just act on every feeling we have. The need to be able to contextualize it and to get feedback on it is critical prior to action.

So can your Impulse Gate be faulty? Sure it can. All of our gates can at times be faulty. Here are three very common things that can cause your Impulse Gate to get stuck in these open positions.

Stress Levels

The more stress we have on us, the more our Impulse Gates can get stuck in the open position and how we are feeling in the moment can come pouring out. This is likely nothing new to you and the reason I write so much on self-care, some blog posts, for example:

• Learning Stress Tolerance

• Don't Forget to Practice Good Self Care

• If You Hate Change You Are Not Doing It Right

The lower your stress levels, the less likely your Impulse Gate is going to get stuck in the open position. As a leader, you can not always be in the “on position”. You have to replenish yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. 

Emotional Flexibility

In addition to stress, the more of a fixed mindset we have in our belief structures about how we should feel in certain situations, the more our Impulse Gates will get stuck in the open position. Being able to push the pause button before acting is key. 

Let me give an example. When I am driving in heavy traffic I have a very defensive mindset. I am on constant alert for other drivers doing things I am not expecting. One day I was running late for a very important client meeting. When I left my hotel I had 10 minutes to get to my appointment and about a 9-minute drive time estimated. I got to the intersection to turn right and merge into traffic. It was a heavy traffic time, and this feeling of panic came over me, so I did something I would not otherwise have done, I pulled out in front of someone to join the flow of traffic. Not smart. Not my best moment. But the point is, when someone else is in traffic and cuts me off, why do I have such a fixed mindset on how horrible a person they are? My Impulse Gate is stuck in the open position. A little more emotional flexibility can help me contextualize the situation and perhaps show some grace to other drivers.

Assertiveness

Our level of how we assert ourselves also needs to be in balance with our Impulse Gate. As I write this post, I am waiting on a call back from a doctor. My wife has had some pain, and I called at 8 am this morning, it is now 10:30 am and I am feeling like I want to call the office and tear someone's head off. If my Impulse Gate is stuck in the open position, then anytime I feel put down or disrespected then it is an excuse for me to assert myself without thinking about the consequences of my actions or about the other person. Will I call the doctor back soon? You bet I will, but it will not be without thought and it will be with a measured level of assertiveness. 

This Impulse Gate can work both ways when it comes to assertiveness. Some leaders out there when the Impulse Gate is stuck open, actually become less assertive. The problem with this is that if our Impulse Control is stronger than our assertiveness, we are at risk of becoming passively aggressive. We pretend something isn’t an issue, but it really is. We say it is not a big deal but it really is. We can even work behind the scenes to sabotage a person or a situation. 

In Conclusion

We all have situations that cause us to be tempted to freak out. Impulse Control or this idea of the Impulse Gate is meant for you to be intentional with your emotions. If something happens to you and you feel like you need to freak out, you have thought about it, you are intentional with it, and you feel like it serves you at the moment, then I guess you can go ahead and freak out. Most of the time though, when this happens, some kind of apology usually comes soon after, or if the apology never happens, then anxiety or guilt can start to take residence.  

Most of the time, I would argue, that if you can step back from the situation and think about the emotion, you might choose a different action. I am not saying to never walk through the Impulse Gate and into action. What I am asking you to consider is walking through a different gate other than Impulse. Perhaps alongside your Impulse Gate, you picture a “rational gate”. Or a “long-term outcome gate”. 

By all means, do NOT just suppress the emotion and keep it in. Make sure it is the right emotion for the right context, you are not stressed, you have some flexibility in how you might feel, and your level of assertiveness matches the situation.

Learning Stress Tolerance

I had an interesting conversation with a coaching colleague the other day. He called me to get some perspective on a difficult client that he was coaching.

Case in Point

His client is a top performer in her field and has aspirations to get promoted in her company. She is a very hard charger and a self-proclaimed perfectionist. Overall, she is respected by the team she leads, but that dynamic is starting to show some cracks. 

In meetings, she is always telling her team to push back on her, and that she is open to feedback. However, the team has recently started shying away from doing this, because when they do, her non-verbal communication says she is not in the mood for it. Her words say “I am open”, but her facial expressions say “Don’t you dare”. 

Her team says she is a workaholic, routinely sending emails around 2 AM. If someone asks her to be in a mentoring relationship, she always says yes. If her bosses ask her to do something, she will call the team together at any time of the day to kick off a project and make assignments. 

My colleague spent a day shadowing her. He went to meetings with her and observed her in her office where her phone rang and text alerts went off constantly. She answered the phone by the second ring and usually picked up the phone to answer her texts within 30 seconds. 

One of her teammates even pulled my colleague aside and said they were really concerned about her, that she rarely takes time to eat and when she does it is only half of a cup of yogurt. They said something to the effect of: “We don’t know when she sleeps. Stuff comes to us at all hours of the night. People on the team have started sleeping with their phone alerts on so that they don't miss anything. This can’t be healthy long term…can it?” 

When I asked my colleague if he had addressed any of this with her yet, he said “yes, to all of it.

Her response to him was that:

1. She loved work, so why wouldn’t she do a lot of it?

2. She has always strived for perfection, and that's what got her where she is today.

3. Her bosses love her production.

4. She feels fine. She eats when she is hungry and she doesn’t require much sleep. 

She Is Not Fine.

The lie that this leader is telling herself is that she is fine. She is not fine.

While things may seem okay to her right now, she is on a path to self-destruction. I have seen this pattern too many times in my leadership coaching. The person who is striving so hard that they never say no, and they have no boundaries.

According to Dr. John Townsend, in his book Hiding From Love, one of the most basic human needs we all have is that of “Integration; Our need for resolving good and bad”. This person just always says yes so that others feel good about them. This is the person who gets a 95% on a test and feels like a failure, so they start believing that the only way to live successfully in the world is to always get 100%. 

Dr. Townsend says that this temporary solution to the tension between real and ideal is always inadequate and involves some sort of splitting between good and bad, keeping the two apart rather than resolving them through forgiveness, both of themselves and others. 

The problem continues for folks like this leader because while it is a psychological concern, it will eventually manifest itself physically as well. 

Dr. Gabor Mate, MD, writes in his book When The Body Says No, that our immune system does not exist in isolation from daily experience. Many people unwittingly spend their lives under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. 

Gabor goes on to write that stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. When emotions are repressed and dissociated from our awareness and relegated to the unconscious, this confuses our physiological defenses and our immune system goes on the attack rather than being in protection mode. 

What I found most interesting in studying Dr.Mate is that almost none of his patients with serious diseases had ever learned to say NO. 

Back to our example: no, she is not fine. She is living in a self-delusion.

George Vaillant said, “It is not stress that kills us. It is effective adaptations to stress that allows us to live.” 

Stress tolerance is the ability to withstand adverse events without developing physical or emotional symptoms by actively and positively coping with stress. One way to positively cope with stress is to learn to resolve the good and the bad. It is what Brene Brown has written extensively on, to begin to look at imperfection as a gift. 

Learning Stress Tolerance

The growth of this emotional intelligence domain takes some very specific work.

The first is developing an understanding of the need leaders have to understand the tension that exists between the ideal and the real, and to resolve the need to understand between good and bad. There is at the beginning of this kind of development the setting of healthy boundaries. There is no need to try to put other coping strategies into place if a leader is going to keep unhealthy boundaries. They just need to know that at some point in the future the data suggests that the body does keep score. There will be a payment due on this kind of life choice.

Once some healthy boundaries are put into place, things like progressive relaxation, purposeful distraction, self-debate, deep breathing, exercise, and spiritual worship can be employed. 

Leaders who are experiencing feedback like my colleagues' clients need to heed the warnings.

The Feedback Is Telling Them Something

You can grow your tolerance to stress in a healthy way. A way that you can become an even better performer and leader. A way that might not have to be as costly to your psyche and your overall health. 

Answer Just One Question to Access Your Emotional Intelligence

I saw an article one day in my online news feed. It had a catchy title, something that really caught my eye regarding the “COVID fog" people are experiencing after they got over the virus. I clicked on it to explore what the author had to say about the topic, and about 4 minutes into the read, the curiosity that caused me to open it still had not been satisfied.  I had to spend 7 minutes to get to the main point, the reason I wanted to read the post in the first place. It was very frustrating. 

I just wanted to know what the title of the article had promised to deliver, which should have taken about 45 seconds, not 7 minutes. I get the whole advertising business model that drives this kind of writing, but frankly, I find it very annoying! Actually, I HATE it!

So, because that tactic annoys me so much, here is the one question I promised you in the title of the article. (I timed it...you’re about 45 seconds into the reading so far…)

Which of the following statements best describes when a leader is being emotional?

1. Their reactions tend to be knee-jerk, or not well thought through.

2. They snap in anger when something isn't right.

3. They say to themselves, "I am so stupid, why did I do that?”

4. They yell when tension is high to get their point across.

5. They are overly confident in their position even when the facts show there is good reason to question.

6. The overly optimistic way they present themselves doesn't fit the reality of the situation.

7. All of the above.

At this point, I hope the answer is obvious. All of these answers show that there is a fine line between expressing emotion and being emotional. I hope you take a deep breath and think about that line before you read on. 

Perhaps even pull out a sheet of paper and a pen, then spend a few moments journaling what you are thinking about this one-question quiz. Go ahead, I'll wait for you to come back.

I am really interested in what you think about the difference between showing emotional intelligence and being emotional.

The Underlying Philosophy 

Since all of the thoughts we as humans have come with an emotion attached, then really what exists is a range of emotion attached to any thought. The person who goes into a meeting with a "poker face" thinking that they will not express emotion on a topic is actually giving those they are interacting with within the room some type of clue as to where they stand. “At ease” is just the opposite end of the “glad” emotional expression range from “ecstatic”, just like “bothered” is the low end of the “mad” emotional expression range from “furious.”

So, if all our thoughts and behaviors have some emotional component to them, then the question to me becomes, how do I pick the right emotion to fit the moment?

To put it another way, How do I display emotion without being emotional?

 The Real Answer To the Question 

The primary idea of being emotionally intelligent is knowing when to display the right emotion, at the right time, for the right context. If you get it right, then that shows intelligence. If you get it wrong, then maybe not so much intelligence.

How does a leader:

1. Not give knee-jerk responses?

   • They balance their lack of impulse control with empathy. Show care and compassion for the other person's needs, not the immediate gratification of your own.

2. Not become angry when something isn't right?

   • They balance their lack of emotional self-awareness with Interpersonal relationships. Prioritize the mutual satisfaction of the relationship over your own selfishness.

3. Not talk down to themselves?

   • They balance the lack of self-regard with optimism. Practice positive self-talk and stop seeing failure as an outcome.

4. Not yell to get a point across?

   • They balance assertiveness with emotional flexibility. Find a different emotion on the “Mad Scale”, substituting irritated for furious.

5. Display overconfidence in a position?

   • They balance their strong “self-actualization“ needs with “reality testing”. This is done by taking a pause and being curious about facts rather than fixating on a position.

I think you get the idea. If a leader is being emotional, then the idea is to strengthen another emotional competency. If the leader is prone to an overly optimistic explanatory style, then strengthening the competency of reality testing will create the needed balance.

I compare this to a weightlifter who wants to get their body into condition. The lifter just loves to do arms, focusing all the development efforts on building biceps and triceps. They go into the gym every day and all they do is lift as much weight as they can with their arms. After a while, the arms look really strong. However, without giving some attention to strengthening the legs, the body isn't really in condition.

The same is true for emotionally intelligent leaders. The key is balance. The real signature to the emotionally intelligent leader is not how much confidence they have, what great relationships they have, or even how compassionate they are. Emotionally Intelligent leaders need balance to effectively lead a group of followers in a healthy and meaningful way.

The 7-Minute Point.

I figured I don't ever have to bury the lead in my blogging because I don't advertise. I don't sell ads and I never will. I don't write for revenue. I write my articles for all of you., to stimulate thinking on the topic I am most passionate about - Organizational Leadership. So if you hate ads too in your own personal blogosphere, then why not pass this post on to a few people you think might enjoy it? Feel free to share with confidence, because we will never sell to them!

Now some of you are saying, there is no way that you can assess someone's emotional intelligence with just one question. Most models for assessing emotional and social functioning are built upon multiple constructs such as Self-Awareness, Emotional Expression, Interpersonal Relationships, Stress-Management, and Problem-Solving.

So how could it be possible, with just one question, to ascertain your emotional intelligence? After all, most assessments for this leadership trait have at least 100 questions that will give you an answer to this question. I completely understand the argument that the details and intricacies of each of these domains are so nuanced and complex that you need questions that come at each of them from multiple perspectives to access a person's skill in any particular domain.

All of the very detailed complexities of assessing a person's emotional intelligence do require distinguishing lenses to give perspective as to how a leader might generally show up. If a "score" is going to be given for a particular trait such as Emotional Flexibility then I totally agree that you need several, if not many, questions to give a numeric level of ability.

However, in the crucible of leadership, when the pressure is really on you do you have the time or the mental resources to stop and think about the skill level of your Emotional Flexibility? I think not. And that is only one of 15 or more competencies in the area of emotional intelligence that you would have to assess to determine your overall emotional intelligence and how the skills are serving you in any particular moment.

The emotional component is too complex to really deal with at any given moment. Most of us have things we are really strong with, such as our self-regard or optimism. These serve you well most of the time. 

The question I started asking myself is this, "Are there times when my emotional intelligence strength is overplayed?" The answer for most of us is a resounding yes. 

If the person who is so empathic doesn't balance it with ensuring that relationships are mutually satisfying, they will at some point burn out. It is inevitable.

If as leaders we can ask ourselves this one question, then perhaps we will gain more enhanced followers. Then we could turn around as leaders and know that the people who are following us really want to be there.

After all, isn't that the point?

What if I Don’t Want to Change?

What is it about change that makes it so difficult for people to process?

Is it the overall complexity that change brings? Or is it the level of comfort that existed prior to the precipitating change event?

One aspect that I have been thinking about is that our aversion may not be to the change itself but to the awareness that the current reality exists at the same time as the new reality.

If the answer is yes to both of the above questions, this makes for a confusing environment.

Consider the following story as an example:

As a member of an organization, “Bob” has a job to do that he has been doing for approximately 24 months. He is competent at the craft and has built some good relationships with people on his team and with his customers. Bob’s supervisor even rated him as exceeding expectations last year which is really quite rare for only being on the job for 2 years.

Then all of a sudden, the organization says it needs to change how it operates. They have to become a more holistic organization. This new structure isn’t really going to be structured at all! It is more of a self-managed, self-organizing network of people who are going to get everyone closer to the customer and to each other. Out with bureaucracy, hierarchy, and consensus.

The consultant who gives the presentation to the company called it a “Teal Organization”. Bob had to research it and learned it was something called “Spiral Dynamics”, which is a new consciousness for business. Teal Organizations are agile, lean, flexible, and responsive to the environment. It all sounded great until Bob started to get a little anxious. Like how flexible? So flexible that he won’t be needed? Feelings of real anxiety started to sweep over him.

Teal organizations, since they distribute decision-making to the lowest levels of the organization, require a level of trust, emotional intelligence, creativity, and intuition that was not previously required. There is a great sense of the work that is being done is for the good of, indeed the survival of the organization and that the individual interests of the contributors are taking a back seat.

As Bob contemplates his old paradigm he feels paralyzed between the drive to the consensus that used to exist and making decisions for the good of the organization (which by the way, Bob remembers is what consensus was supposed to do).

He wants very much to succeed in this new world order, but he is not sure exactly how to do that.

How was he supposed to come to work today and be inclusive with all his business partners and at the same time make decisions on his own?

He feels tremendous uncertainty in what his role is and a lot of ambiguity in how he’s supposed to do his job.

And then, on top of all of this, his wife says that maybe they should not have bought their new house.

This did not help calm his thinking.

Personal Example

I know how our protagonist Bob in the above scenario feels about change. I remember when I first got married, and my wife Kim and I were on our honeymoon. Now, for any person, marriage brings on a very significant change. On the morning of my wedding I woke up single, but by 1 pm that afternoon I was married. This was a new reality that I did not fully understand.

I was excited about the change though. I anticipated with positive anxiety the reality that was ahead. And unlike many who experience a change in an organization, I was a willing participant who was choosing this destiny.

For our honeymoon, my bride and I set off on a Caribbean cruise. Seven fun-filled days just the two of us. On our first night at sea, we were walking to dinner. I was so excited to eat because the number one thing people told me about cruising was that the food is outstanding. Or, maybe it was the fact we had skipped lunch and I was famished. No matter, when I got to the dining room I turned around and Kim was nowhere to be found. Where could she be? So, I started retracing my steps and when I rounded the corner there she was…just standing…and waiting.

“What’s wrong?” I enquired. “Are you OK?”

“I am fine,” she said. Then she went on and delivered the truth that helped me realize my new reality. “You are married now, and I would really like to walk to dinner with you and not behind you.”

Ouch! What a change lesson that was for me.

My old paradigm of singleness was confronted with my new reality of being married. If I was going to be any good at this being married thing, then I had to understand what this new life was all about.

I am so thankful that I married a very patient woman. She has been at my side now for 35 years teaching me all about what it means to start something new.

The real key if you are experiencing a dramatic change in your organization, or if you are doing something like getting married, is to pay close attention to the relationships between people. For this new reality to be successful we have to replace our negative and anxious feelings with those of a more positive outlook.

Being in the middle of change requires us to slow our thinking down and manage the anxieties we are experiencing.

Sure we will stumble at times, but let’s not forget that a step backward is not failure. It is just learning. No one, not even those leading the change in organizations knows everything. We all need space to think and to understand what our new way forward looks like.