Covey’s first habit: be proactive

Alternative approaches, Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Following the recent death of Stephen Covey, I have been revisiting his most famous of books, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  On my way to meet a client I take time on the train to read about Covey’s first habit:  be proactive.

In this first habit, Covey targets the opportunity for self-determinism that sits between stimulus and response.  This is about the difference between an unconscious reaction and a carefully chosen response.  Covey uses the story of Viktor Frankl who, in the Nazi death camps in World War II, realised that (in Covey’s words) “he could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him”.  Covey is careful to differentiate between being proactive and taking the initiative.  He says:

[Proactive] means more than merely taking the initiative.  It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives.  Our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.  We can subordinate feelings to values.  We have the initiative and responsibility to make things happen.
This assertion tests me – because I hold the view that emotions have a wisdom to which we need to listen.  But quickly I settle into an understanding of what Covey is saying.  Given my own values for example, I would choose to view the emotion of anger as a sign that some need is not being met and to recognise that I am telling myself some story about how someone else is responsible.  If I act on the stimulus – react – without thinking, I am likely to lose my temper.  If I respond in line with my values, I am bound to take time out to process my emotions before choosing my response.  So far, so good.

Covey offers a further idea which is the consequence of taking this kind of responsibility and which challenges me greatly:

[…] until a person can say deeply and honestly “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday”, that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise”.

Later he refines this idea by adding:
It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.  Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow.  But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all.
And further:
Any time we think the problem is “out there”, the thought is the problem”. 
When we think the challenges in our businesses are down to the market, when we think we have a “problem” member of staff, when we complain that our wife/husband/boss/sister doesn’t understand us… when we wish that things outside us were different, we are not being proactive in Covey’s use of this term.  When we focus our attention on  those things we can do something about, we are being proactive.
Covey offers a number of ways to apply this first habit, of which I highlight just one:
1.  For a full day, listen to your language and to the language of the people around you.  How often do you use and hear reactive phrases such as “If only,” “I can’t,” or “I have to”?
Please let me know how you get on.

Stephen Covey – the death of a leadership master

Developing as a leader, ,

News has been reaching me from various sources of the death of Stephen Covey on Monday, aged 79.  He died as a result of complications following a bicycle accident in April and with his family around him.  As much as I feel sad about those complications  I can’t help thinking that Covey’s was a good way to go.  If you’re still cycling-fit as you approach 80 and have the love of your family, well, it’s not a bad life – or death.

Covey is most famous for his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  First published in 1989, Covey’s book has provided guidance for conscious living which has had its application in the workplace and at home.  USA Today, in a blog posting about Covey, highlighted something I didn’t know – or had forgotten – about the origins of Covey’s work:

Covey said he developed the 7 Habits after studying hundreds of books and essays on success written since 1776. He noticed that the literature of the 20th century was dominated by gimmicks or “social Band-Aids” to improve the personality.


In contrast, the literature of the first 150 years — in the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin, for example — was based on character and principles such as integrity, courage and patience.

Covey said of his Seven Habits:

“(Live by) your own set of principles, your sense of vision of what your life is about. Maybe in a few months or year and a half, two years, you’ll be in an altogether different world.”


I make a note to revisit this book which has had so much influence across the world – selling over 20 million copies in 38 languages since it was first published.  (As I write I am setting myself the challenge of writing a blog posting on each of the seven habits in the course of the next three weeks).  For now, though, I just want to take a moment to honour the man.  As much as I feel for his family at the time of his death, my own heart is filled with gratitude for the gifts he shared with the world during his life.

Managing up and across

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Increasingly, business takes place within a “matrix”.  Managers manage the work of people who are not their direct reports.  People manage projects whose success depends on the inputs of people across the organisation.  Priorities shift and change.  Priorities compete.  Work styles clash.  And that’s before you factor in the boss – have you noticed yet that the boss also needs to be managed?  Not surprisingly, this new reality is rarely reflected in the literature.  A wide range of good research was conducted in a bygone era – before the matrixed organisation gained ground.


So, I was intrigued to notice recently that the Harvard Business Review is due to publish the HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across.  This is what they say about it:



Does your boss make you want to scream? Do you have more than one boss? Do you spend your day corralling people who don’t report to you? Do you work across departmental silos? Collaborate with outside contractors?


Then you know that managing up and across your company is critical to doing your job well. It’s all about understanding your boss’s and colleagues’ priorities, pressures, and work styles. You need to manage up and across not just because you may have a problem boss, an incompetent colleague, or fabulously hairy projects that touch all parts of your organization. You need to manage up and across, for example, to get your marketing and sales folks to see that your project will help them meet their goals, too; to establish authority with higher ups so they’ll bless your new product ideas; to secure people’s time for a new team when they’re already feeling overextended.


The Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you get the information and resources you need to solve your challenges, increase your effectiveness, and make your day-to-day worklife more enjoyable.

The Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you get better at:


• Getting what you need from people who don’t report to you

• Coping with micromanaging, conflict-aversive, or generally incompetent bosses

• Discovering what drives your colleagues

• Partnering with your boss

• Selling your ideas up and across your company

• Making the most of your boss’s influence

• Establishing a shared vision and commitment

• Juggling multiple bosses’ priorities

• The art of persuasion—tailoring your pitch based on your audience

I haven’t read it (yet) and still, I do know that it’s addressing challenges that we increasingly face in the workplace.

Wanting to influence your staff? Listen up!

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Research at the Columbia Business School has recently highlighted the role of listening in being influential.  Researchers asked co-workers both to assess their colleagues’ skills and habits and to assess how influential they are.  They conducted this research with students on MBA programmes as well as with executives in organisations.

The research findings do not entirely dispel the myth of the charismatic leader.  Rather, researchers found that the most influential people had strong skills both in listening and in expressing their point of view.  Why is listening so important?  On the one hand, listening helps leaders gather information about those they lead which they can use to tailor an influencing approach.  On the other hand, listening – really listening – builds trust amongst staff.

In truth, I am reminded of Gary Chapman’s little book The Five Love Languages:  The Secret to Love that Lasts.  Although its intended audience is a long way from the world of business, Chapman’s thesis – that we all like to give and receive love in five different ways – offers insights which – surely – can equally be applied in the workplace.

And if you want to learn more about the research from Columbia Business School, including five key ways in which you can listen effectively, just follow this link to read a summary.

Setting objectives that have punch in your business

Developing as a leader,

Sometimes, I come across something thought-provoking in an area of interest to my clients and take pleasure in sharing it here.  Today, I share from Alan Weiss’ newsletter at the Summit Consulting Group.  The article below is copyrighted and I share it with Alan’s permission.

I preface it by saying that Alan writes for those who are selling their services and you may be in a different position – perhaps you’re a manager setting objectives for your staff or perhaps you, in turn, are agreeing objectives with your boss.  As you read Alan’s article below I invite you to ponder what learning there is in his article for you.  And if you’re willing to share I’d love to read your comments.

Here’s what Alan has to say:

Gaining conceptual agreement

When you find an economic buyer—someone who can write or authorize a check for your value proposition as represented in your proposal—you must gain conceptual agreement on the objectives of the project, the measures for success (progress and/or completion), and the value that results from reaching those objectives.

An OBJECTIVE is a business outcome, never a deliverable or task or input. A strategy retreat is not an objective. But if you ask, “Why?” (do you desire a strategy retreat) the answer is usually the objective: “Because we want to expand into new markets and require a strategy to do so effectively.”

A METRIC or measure of success is an indicator of progress. It has to be recognized formally by objective analysis, or informally by someone charged to do so. A sales report on average size of sales is an objective measure, and your spouse’s determination of the comfort of the driver’s seat of a new car is an informal but also effective measure. There must be at least one metric for every objective.

VALUE is what is delivered by each objective, and there are usually several value statements per objective. If Increased profit is an objective, then the impact of achieving it (value) might include: larger bonuses, larger dividends for investors, more investment in R&D, and stronger ability to attract top talent.

Case study

Here’s how I would improve an example of each aspect of conceptual agreement:

Objective: Improve teamwork
Better: Create seamless client interfaces with no duplication of effort and with client concerns rectified on first contact.

Metric: People are more confident in dealing with clients
Better: Fewer client issues are referred to senior management and client complaints drop by at least 10 percent.

Value: Clients are happier and complain less.
Better: Client referrals create 10 percent more business than currently achieved, with zero cost of acquisition.

Frequently asked question

Q. What do I do if a buyer answers a conceptual agreement question with “I don’t know how to measure progress”?

A. Ask how the buyer knows that the current performance isn’t satisfactory, creating the need for your discussion. There must be an indicator of poor performance now that can also be used to determine improved performance.

Lost your temper with your staff? You need to express your regret

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So, you did it.  Like Maestro Papadopoulos (see Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides), you spoke sharply with a member or members of your staff.  Time has elapsed.  You realise you made a mistake in speaking in the way you did.  You’ve taken time to process your anger.  You’ve learnt from the experience.  What next?

You may be hoping that it’s enough to show up differently next time.  If you do, you’ll be joining the legions of bosses who, having lost their temper, are “extra nice” next time round – but it’s not enough.  Why?  After all, surely your staff can tell that you’re sorry from your behaviour?  Well, yes, and still, knowing this alone is not enough.

What more do your staff want?  They want understanding for the experience they had on the receiving end of your anger.  They want to know that you understand the impact it had on them – some call this empathy.  They want to know that you’re ready to take responsibility for your actions and eager to learn to handle things differently in future.  This helps them to feel safe.  They also want judgement – discernment, acceptance:  even if (especially if) you have to deal with performance that is below par, they need to know that you can separate them – the person, the people – from their behaviour.  These needs may be hidden from your staff behind their own “righteous anger” towards you – unless they have high levels of emotional maturity they won’t forgive you until you’ve expressed your regret.

Now, I do want to differentiate between expressing your regret and saying sorry.  This isn’t about beating yourself up or putting yourself in the wrong.  Nor is it about the kind of insincere apology that London commuters make even as they push you to one side to get to where they want to go.  This is about connecting with, and expressing, your sincere regret.  For Maestro Papadopoulos, such an expression might have gone something like this:

“I said a couple of things I regretted at our rehearsal on Tuesday.  I said it wasn’t acceptable to me that members of the choir were missing from our rehearsal and I said it in a way which put those of you who’d made the effort to get here on time in the wrong.  And I also compared the children’s choir with the ‘famous London Symphony Chorus’ in a way that put your choir in a bad light.  Afterwards I felt bad about this because I realised it was my nerves talking – I wanted to offer our audience a great performance and I felt anxious about the concert.  I also realise that, as amateur singers many of you came to sing at the end of a hard days work in preparation for a concert and the last thing you needed was to be on the receiving end of my anger.  I wish I had handled the situation with more grace”.


There is at least one paradox at play here, as there often is in life.  The first is this:  that beating ourselves up (“I made a right mess of that rehearsal… I shouldn’t have said what I did…” etc.) somehow doesn’t lead us to take responsibility for our actions.  Rather, it takes courage and self compassion to really step up to the plate.  A second paradox is this:  as leaders, it is our very ability to express our sincere regret about actions which fell below our aspirations that make our staff think highly of us.  We need to accept ourselves as human, just like everybody else, before we can make the kind of expression of regret that staff can receive.


So, I have said about as much as I want to say right now on the subject of losing your temper with your staff.  I wonder, what has been your experience?  And what have you found in these postings that has enabled you to do things differently?  I’d love to hear about your experiences via the comments section of this blog.

Lost your temper with your staff? A second way to turn anger into gold

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

On Monday I shared one of my favourite ways to transform anger as part of a series of postings in recent weeks.  Today I offer a second way.  The first (see Lost your temper with your staff?  Turning anger into gold) was from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and relies heavily on conscious intention.  This second is from the school of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and relies on the brain’s ability to process information in a variety of different ways.  The process is called the “meta-mirror” and I’ve written about it a couple of times before (see As a meta of fact and Thinking of all the mirrors in my bedroom).

The meta-mirror is a process I find invaluable when I am angry with someone or telling myself that I am “right” and they are “wrong”.  It’s also a process that I often teach leaders on programmes to develop their coaching skills, because it hones our ability to see things from multiple points of view – an important skill in coaching as well as when dealing with our own emotions.  Today is is the first time I’ve attempted to describe the process of the meta-mirror in detail and I do so with some hesitation:  whilst it’s easy to use with the right training, you may want to seek out a skilled NLP Practitioner to support you in translating the description below into practice.

As a first step, think of someone or something you feel angry about.  Find a place where you have room to move around and stand on the first corner of an imaginary rectangle, facing the second corner.  You are now in “first position”.  Imagine the person you feel angry about is in front of you and say what you think – no holds barred!  In first position you are not practising what you might say in future – you are saying whatever comes to mind now.  Keep going until you feel complete.  (As long as you want to say “And another thing…”, just say it).

When you have finished, step out of first position and shake off (yes, really!  take a moment to shake your arms and body) everything that you have just experienced.  This is an important precursor to stepping into the second corner of your imaginary rectangle, facing the spot you were standing in when you were in first position.  You are now in “second position”.  Imagine yourself in the shoes of the person you were talking to in first position, receiving everything you have just said.  Notice what comes up for you – you may be surprised!  This is not about any conscious processing.  Rather, it’s about noticing what thoughts and feelings emerge.

When you have done this, repeat the process of stepping out of this position and shaking off everything you have just experienced.  Then step round the triangle to the third corner.  You are now in “third position”.  From this position, look back at first position and ask yourself “how does this me here see that me there?”  You will experience one of two things.  You may notice that the same anger you felt before is still with you – in this case step back into first position and express everything that is alive in you.  Equally, from this third position, you may be able to see yourself in a new way or have new insights about the situation that stimulated your anger in the first place.  At this point, you’re ready to move on.

Once again, shake off everything you’ve experienced in third position and move to the fourth and final corner of the rectangle.  From here you can see yourself in first position and in third position.  Ask yourself “Which me would I like to be in this situation?”  It’s likely that you will choose the you that emerged in third position – take a moment to “swap” yous – it helps to point to them both and to use your hands to swap them over.  Once again, shake off everything that you have experienced before moving on.

Step back into first position and begin the process again.  Having swapped your first you with your third, it’s likely that you will have different feelings about the person or situation and different things to say.  Say them – keep talking until you are done.  Shake everything off before moving on.  As you did at the beginning of the exercise, step into second position and receive everything you said in first position.  Notice what comes up.  The experience should be quite different this time round – a different response to different thoughts and feelings.  When you’re done, shake your experience off and step back into first position to receive the response of the other person.


If your work is done, you will be feeling peaceful and resourceful.  However, at any moment in this process, you may notice that you’re not done yet – that’s OK.  When you spot this, it’s a signal that you need to go back to first position and express yourself fully before continuing the process outlined above.  Especially when you first start to use this process, it helps to have the support of a skilled and certified NLP Practitioner to guide you.

You may be wondering if this process is an invitation to ignore the failings of others and the answer is no – in your role as a leader, however, you do need to bring your most resourceful self to the party when holding others to account.

And is that it?  Well, in terms of the meta-mirror, yes, it is.  If you’ve lost your temper with your staff, though, there is probably one more step to take.  This will be the subject of my next posting.

Lost your temper with your staff? Turning anger into gold

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, , ,

Recently, I wrote about how I experienced the behaviour of conductor Mario Papadopoulos in rehearsal in a posting entitled Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides.  When we lose our temper we risk losing our authority and the respect of those we lead.  But all is not lost when we lose our temper.  The question is what to do next – and how – to turn our anger into gold.


In what way does anger become gold?  In my experience, we turn anger into gold when we take time to connect with the unmet needs that underpin our anger.  Creating this awareness opens up the opportunity to find ways to meet our needs.  We get to feel better.  And we achieve this without alienating others on whom we depend.


How can we transform anger into gold?  Here is just one of my favourite ways, from Marshall Rosenberg.  In the approach he has called Nonviolent Communication (see his book of the same name to learn more), Rosenberg encourages the use of self empathy to get beneath the surface of our anger.


How does it work?  As a first step, you might notice what has stimulated your anger and seek to make a clear observation, cutting out any “stories” you might be telling yourself or at least owning your story.  For example, your first reaction might be to think “John’s really let me down!  He’s so unreliable!  He should have let me know if there were problems meeting the deadline!” A more accurate observation might be to say: “When I asked John if he’d finished the report yet he said no.  I felt a powerful surge of anger and I notice that I was thinking ‘I told you three weeks ago that the report was due by the end of this week.  If there were problems, why the **** didn’t you tell me?'”


In this case, the observation leads us to our second step, which is to connect with our emotion (in this case, anger) and this is something that Rosenberg also encourages.  When we feel angry, there is usually another emotion – fear – lurking underneath, so it may help to make a further observation as we examine what it is we are afraid of.  Using the same example, you might notice another layer of thinking and emotion such as:  “I realised I had really messed up but I didn’t want to admit it.  I’d been so busy myself that I hadn’t checked John’s progress and with the deadline approaching there was barely time to finish the report.  I’ve been worried about how my boss has been thinking about me and I didn’t want to give him an opportunity to think less of me”.


As we begin to turn our “story” into a clear observation and connect to our feelings, we can move to the third step, which is to notice what needs were stimulated in us and – in this case – unmet.  This is about going beyond specific actions by specific people to understand the underlying needs.  In this example, it’s possible that your most fundamental need – for security – was stimulated, especially if your thoughts included thoughts about the risk of losing your job and what that would mean for your home and for your ability to pay for food and other essentials.


Once you have uncovered your underlying needs, you have the option to make a request of yourself or of someone else.  This is the final step in Rosenberg’s four-step process.  Perhaps you might start by requesting of yourself that you take time out to relax before talking to John about next steps in order to calm down.  Or you might make a request of John that he tell you just how far he’s got so that you can assess how much more need to be done to meet the deadline.


Going through this process has the potential to transform feelings of fear and anger into a deep sense of connection with our needs.  In doing so, it moves us away from our primitive “fight or flight” response towards a more resourceful state in which we can clearly assess the situation and find ways to meet our needs.


There is another way I like to use to transform anger into gold.  If you’d like a second option – keep reading.

Singing the Grande Messe des Morts at St. Paul’s Cathedral

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Photo: The timp line up for tonight's Grande Messe des Morts at St Paul's Cathedral - all 10 of them. It's completely sold out tonight but still a few left for tomorrow (http://bit.ly/PbpWlZ), and it'll be live on Radio 3 tomorrow too.
Yes, I was there, singing Berlioz’ extraordinary piece – the Grande Messe des Morts.  A requiem for the dead on a grand scale.  David Jackson, percussionist extraordinaire with the London Symphony Orchestra, took this photo of the timps section during rehearsal in the afternoon.  One of the players was a dead ringer for comedian Rob Brydon which intrigued me all the way through the rehearsal.  It was a noisy affair – the piece itself alternates between passages of great richness of sound and moments of sparseness.  (With more time I would hone my language in an attempt to convey something of this amazing piece).  And of course, in rehearsal, we shared the space with visitors to the cathedral with their murmurings and occasional applause.
The performance was altogether different.  Even with a full audience the sound space belonged to the performers and – more than the performers – to Berlioz.  The off-stage brass were high in the galleries so that the Tuba Mirum was a moment of high drama with the interplay between orchestra, off-stage brass and the men who were in fine sound.  I shall leave it to the critics to say more.
Singing in St. Paul’s is always a mixed blessing.  The sound reverberates around the space so that the old jokes are always about coming back in a week’s time to hear the performance for the last time.  There were moments when our conductor, Sir Colin Davis, paused so that we could, indeed, hear the sound before it faded away.  This is a new way of experiencing the phrase “right back atcha!”  This added to the heightened experience of an already grand piece.
At the same time, it is this very soundscape that makes it a challenging venue in which to perform.  You cannot rely on listening to know if you are singing in time!  There were moments when I thought fellow performers – singers, orchestra, off-stage brass – were ahead or behind Sir Colin’s beat and still, it’s hard to know what the effect was for the audience.
For me, it was something of a marathon.  Like all marathon runners, singers need the right shoes and the truth is that, for me, no shoes is the optimum way to stand for such a long period and also strictly verboten.  Still I might try it this evening (don’t tell my voice rep).  For yes, I’ll be performing again this evening before getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for a coaching session in the morning.  And now, I am on my way to meet one of my clients for another coaching session.
Before I press “publish” I take a moment to savour the rich privileges of a life in which I get to earn my living doing work I love and spend my spare time doing something else that I also love.  Maybe I’ll see you there this evening.

Berlioz and a tinnitus of timps

About Dorothy

Shortly I’ll be closing down my computer to go and sing – I’m taking the afternoon off to rehearse at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a concert this evening of Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts.  Yesterday we rehearsed at the Barbican and I wondered, “What is the collective noun for timps?”  A herd of kettle drums?  I don’t think so… a tinnitus of timps, perhaps.  I counted thirteen – for this is a work of epic proportions.  We are also two choirs – the London Symphony Chorus and the London Philharmonic Choir.

Whilst our focus is on the concerts that lie ahead, there are memorable moments – striking in the moment – during rehearsals and yesterday was one.  We gathered at the Barbican’s concert hall for our first tutti rehearsal.  The orchestra alone filled the extended concert platform so someone came up with the idea of placing our conductor – our much loved Sir Colin Davis – at the rear of the concert platform, with the orchestra facing him and the choir singing from the stalls.  The Barbican was ours and ours alone.  The effect was to combine the grandeur of the piece with a sense of intimacy as if, somehow, this was a performance for us, and us alone.


As I start to gather together all that I need for this evening’s concert – concert dress, black handbag, music, make-up – I start to imagine the same musicians in the much larger venue of St. Paul’s Cathedral and to recognise the challenge we face.  Yesterday Sir Colin was so far away – will we be any closer today?  We need to watch him like a hawk to follow his tempi for with so many musicians we cannot rely on sound which takes time to travel.  And that’s before we factor in the pauses, the changes of tempo in the midst of movements…

I take time for one final action from my ‘to do’ list before I go and send a quick e-mail to friends and family before I go.  It reads:

Dear friends and LSC groupies


I’ll be going off to rehearse shortly for our two concerts (this evening and tomorrow) of Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts.  You just can’t beat the live performance of such an epic piece!


Still, in case you won’t be at the concert and would like to know what I get up to in my spare time, listen out on BBC’s Radio 3 tomorrow – for details just follow this link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jz3z1.  And if you’d like to book tickets you’ll find them at http://lso.co.uk/page/3090/City-of-London-Festival-2012-Berlioz-Requiem/544.


Much love


Dorothy


Memories are made of such moments as this.