Wanting to engage your staff?

Developing as a leader,

How often, when preparing feedback for senior leaders following their assessments for new posts, do I find myself highlighting the need for them to develop and communicate a clear vision for their new team?  It is often a gap.

On the very day that I explore this topic with someone I interviewed recently, a quip from a colleague – sharing his lack of German alongside a famous quote (Ich bin ein Berliner) – reminds me of one visionary speech:  John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1963 in Berlin.  There is an urban myth about Kennedy’s speech, which rests on the fact that “Berliner”, as well as being someone from Berlin, also refers to a kind of jelly doughnut made in Berlin.  The myth is nicely dispelled on About.com – just follow this link.

You can also watch Kennedy make this speech on YouTube – in less than five minutes he makes the case for the free world at a time when the West was at cold war with communism.  Twenty-five years before the Berlin Wall came down Kennedy packs a punch when, whilst acknowledging the challenges of a free world, he highlights that the democratic West does not have to build a wall to keep its people in.  The phrase Ich bin ein Berliner signals his solidarity with the people of Berlin, and he repeatedly uses the phrase let them come to Berlin as a rhetorical device, countering by turn the key arguments for communism.

Such speeches may seem a far cry from the dry and dusty corridors of corporate Britain (and elsewhere) and still, the leader’s ability to engage his or her staff in a vision for the future is one of ways s/he can move the performance of a team or organisation from ordinary to great.  This is the difference – for staff – between knowing what they need to do and doing it because it moves them towards some heartfelt aspiration.  Sharing a vision – again and again and again – can capture the imagination and speak to the heart so that people want to come to work, they want to overcome obstacles, they want to succeed.

Daniel Goleman, in his book The New Leaders, positions this visionary leadership style as one of the styles that builds what he calls ‘resonance’ – it’s worth reading to understand the importance of this leadership style.  And if you want to see more footage of visionary speeches just follow the link to Kennedy’s speech and cast your eyes down the right hand side, where you will find many other examples of the visionary speech.

You think staff pay rises are about money?

Developing as a leader

It’s official.  As of last week Britain has hit the dreaded double-dip recession.  In these difficult times it’s easier than ever to say no to requests for a pay rise… or is it?

Whilst some people view it as futile right now to harbour longings for more pay, many do not.  A depressed economy does not mean you won’t get asked for higher pay.  And the fact that people aren’t asking doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking about it.  The truth is, even if your staff aren’t talking about pay right now, the way you handle the question of pay in the down-turn is one factor your staff will take into account when the economy begins to turn.

As a leader in your organisation, I wonder how you feel about the question of pay at this time.  Perhaps you are telling yourself the answer is easy right now – the dent in profits your company has taken in the downturn makes it easy to say “no, we can’t afford it right now”.  Perhaps you feel anxious when you think that you can’t reward John, whose contribution is so central to your team’s success, with more pay or a promotion.  You know he was happy to wait two years ago but now you can see he’s starting to feel restless, frustrated, impatient…  Perhaps you want to have more open conversations with those you lead about their pay and rations but you don’t know how.

I wonder if you’d find these conversations easier if you had one clear thought in your mind:  pay is never about the money.  Yes, you read me correctly, pay is never about the money.  Sometimes, pay is indeed about what money can buy – for in this recession we are learning the hard lesson that we have survival needs that sometimes come under threat.  Money is what buys (or rents) a home, food and other essentials.  This isn’t to say that earning a wage is the only way to meet our needs for food and shelter.  And it isn’t to say that covering the essentials will always keep your staff happy.

More often, pay has symbolic value – or can buy something that does.  For some, for example, the ability to buy a larger house or more expensive car is as much about status or self-esteem as it is about comfort or ease.  How else would we have been persuaded to stretch so far beyond our means in the economic upturn?  Advertising links items we can buy with a vast array of human needs, holding out the (often false) promise that buying a car will lead us to intimacy or make us more attractive, or that buying the latest cool gadget will make us part of a community of cool gadgeteers.

So, what should you do?  I could offer the obligatory “seven ways” – perhaps one day I will.  For now though, I wonder how well you understand the diversity of needs your staff are bringing with them to work.  And if you don’t, how could you find out?  To test this I invite you to take five minutes for each member of your team and ask yourself, what do I know about what’s most important for this member of my team?  Better still, take time with your staff to ask for their thoughts.

You may be surprised.  Recently, I smiled when a colleague spontaneously told me how she and her husband measured their wealth.  For him, a key criterion was the amount of spare time he had.  For her, it was the quality of her compost.

Who do you rely on?

Developing as a leader,

On Friday, I went with members of my family – my mother, my nephew and niece Edward and Rebecca, and Rebecca’s husband Phil – to The Spice of Life Indian restaurant in Lewisham to celebrate Edward’s and my birthday (same day, different year!).  It was probably late in 1988 or early in 1989 when I first visited the Spice and I’ve been going there ever since.  Meals at the Spice with friends and regular take-aways have formed a backdrop to the times in my life when things have been going well and the tougher times, too.

Today, responding to a couple of invitations to Link In and sending out a couple of my own, I pause to reflect on the question:  who do I rely on?  Because in these days of mobile careers and social networking the number of people we can call on and the number of people we actually do can be quite different.  There are friends and family who have been with me since my earliest years and others whom I have met along the way.  There are colleagues who have stood out along the way as offering wisdom and providing welcome support.  There are people from whose work I have learnt from and which I continue to explore – some by my participation in training programmes and others whose work I have devoured by reading and other means.  There are those people who have supported my practical needs (Moody at the Spice has looked after my need for food over the years and Gary has had ample mention for his great work on my kitchen over the turn of the year).

It’s interesting to reflect on how many people contribute to my well-being and in how many ways, even whilst none of them has the skill or time to make the right contribution every time I need support.  This can make for an interesting paradox – with so many people who can and do support me it is nonetheless easy to find myself without the support I need unless I ask.  I have already mentioned on this blog just how much receiving support relies on the willingness to make a request and to hear a ‘no’ as well as a ‘yes’.

Many of my clients, progressing through successive layers of leadership, find it challenging to balance reaching out for help with other considerations.  Early in their leadership careers they are keen to maintain the image of ‘someone who knows’ and this can make them hesitate to seek support.  At more senior levels, telling themselves they need to maintain confidentiality in any number of business matters they find the pool of peers and seniors is ever diminishing as a proportion of the people they interact with.  And still, they do need support.   You do need support.

In case you want to check in with yourself around the extent to which your needs for support are easily met here are just four questions for you:

  • How confident are you that you notice in time when you have a need for support?
  • How confident are you that you have people in your life who have the means to provide support when you need it across a range of needs?
  • How confident are you that, when you need support, there are at least three people you would be willing to call on to request the support you need?
  • How confident are you that, if one person says no, you’d be willing to keep reaching out and asking until you find the support you need?
Give yourself a mark out of ten for each one – the higher the marks, the more confident you are that you have the support you need.
(Oh!  And supper at the Spice was wonderful – good food, good company, with fun and laughter as well as plenty of popadoms)

The perennial problem of change

Developing as a leader, Developing leadership across your organisation,

How many organisations are seeking to make changes right now to meet the challenges of a falling economy (yes, we’re back in recession in the UK), to address problems within organisations, to drive up profits, to seize opportunities…?


Susan Popoola wrote an interesting summary of The Problems With Change Projects in organisations, published on Discuss HR as well as on the Human Resources UK group on LinkedIn.  Discussion is raging on LinkedIn where there are also some interesting links to other resources.


I added my own two penn’orth as a way to give myself a break one day last week.  This is what I said:


Wow! Lots of really great stuff on this discussion! I especially noticed Andy’s assertion that “The business wants the change to happen a.s.a.p, and there’s a lot of energy at the beginning of the change programme which then starts to evaporate when the going gets tough”. 

Is it possible that one of the issues is that people in senior roles get anxious when things look in any way “messy”? If you’re the sponsor of a programme of change there are moments when things are messy and outcomes are uncertain and when you could well be thinking ahead to the personal implications for you if things don’t turn around. In these moments it’s easy to start looking for a scapegoat or for the next great thing.
 
It’s more challenging (and courageous) to go deep and to ask, just why is this proving so difficult? Especially because this implies being open and willing to learn about our own weaknesses and things we need to do differently. 

I wonder, what’s the culture in your organisation around change?  And how do people respond when things start to go wrong?

Bring on the year ahead!

About Dorothy,
Britain weather: despite deluge, ministers tell us to do more to save water

It’s been a strange week.  In the midst of drought Britain has seen more rain in recent days than I can remember for a long time – and even the odd tornado.  I have been waiting for gaps in the rain to take my beloved seedlings outside for toughening up in their mini-greenhouse (and keeping an eye on the winds lest they get blown away).

My birthday on Tuesday was much as I expected it.  I took time to have an indulgent breakfast – coffee and a bacon butty (strictly against the doctor’s orders) before I started to work.  Edward, my nephew, was also up in time to join me in opening cards and presents on our shared birthday.  Then I took to my study to pore over notes from an interview I conducted last week.  First I pulled together my evidence and decided on the ratings against the client’s competency model and then, after lunch, I wrote the report and sent it off.  It was all finished in time for me to bring those seedlings indoors and go off to choir for rehearsal in the evening.  On the way back I bought myself a McChicken burger – not so much a birthday treat as a late-evening ‘what on earth shall I eat?’ decision.  Even after all these years, I still struggle to know what to eat and when on choir evenings.

And yes, there were cards and messages on Facebook and more besides.  I phoned Mum on my way to choir who told me she’d been awake at ten minutes past midnight remembering my birth.  I came home to a message on the phone from my younger brother and his family – singing happy birthday down the phone.  (My nephew, aged six, was doing at least as much giggling as singing).  The cards and messages have continued to arrive as the week has gone on including one from a lost friend who looked me up on the world wide web and dropped me an unexpected line.  And celebrations will continue today with the arrival of my mother and my niece and her husband and a birthday trip to the Spice of Life Indian restaurant.

At the same time, I have been grappling with some kind of low-level flu-like bug which has left me feeling rather weak.  There have been moments when it has felt as though my joints were on fire.  Yesterday, when all my reports were written and signed off I checked my diary and asked myself:  is there anything that can’t wait until next week?  When I decided there wasn’t I took myself to bed for an afternoon sleep.  Later, I got up and walked around the garden and realised that, feeling so weak, there was no way I would be going to choir.  I curled up at home and went to bed ready to resume that sleep.  Today I feel refreshed – and still glad the weekend lies ahead.

I wouldn’t change a bit of it.  In the end, a rich life is made up of tiny details as much as it is of its significant events.  As I finish the week I am celebrating with a glad and peaceful heart.  Bring on the year ahead!

On my birthday: note to self

All articles

It’s your birthday today.  You’ve got a full day ahead – don’t beat yourself up about that (just take a moment to book time off on your birthday next year).

Busy or not busy, take time today to notice what you did in the last year that you would never have dreamt of doing a few years ago.  Notice the courage you’ve shown in your learning as well as the things you’ve learnt.

Stop making comparisons.  You know they only get you down or – worse still – put someone else down (even if only in your mind).  And when you do make comparisons – with your distant ideal or some younger (slimmer, fitter, faster, something-or-other-er) or older (wiser, more gracious, richer, more successful…) self, hold yourself with compassion for where you are now.

Take time to notice what’s working in your life, including (especially) the tiniest of things.  In case you need reminding, the joy is not in the lottery win or the next big contract, it’s right there in your dining room in the seed trays by the window.

Enjoy those Christmas-and-birthdays-only illicit pleasures (you know what they are) AND notice whether they do still give you joy.  Let go of the ones that don’t.

Finish your client report on time, but not at the expense of receiving – yes, really receiving – the love and best wishes of friends, family and colleagues.  Let the day be spacious and joyful as well as busy and productive.

It’s OK to be where you are – whatever you feel today, let your feelings be welcome and hold them with care.  Everything is welcome.

If you’re reading this, you’re still alive.  Everything you experience today is only possible because you are alive. (And yes, it’s OK that you may never truly realise just what a gift this is).  Being alive, being yourself – oh!  and drinking your birthday cup of coffee – who could ask for more?

Making requests as an aspect of organisational culture

Developing as a leader, Developing leadership across your organisation, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Yesterday I was working from home, as I mostly do on a Monday.  It was a busy day, but not so densely packed that I didn’t have time to take in some fresh air at lunch time.  In fact, I did something that I have recently taken to doing and wandered the length of Lewisham’s market stalls – just two minutes from home – to ask the stall holders if any of them had any waste products that could go into my compost bin.

In recent weeks I have learnt just how willingly the local stall holders give the gift of their green waste which otherwise goes into the immense bins provided by our local council for disposal elsewhere.  Yesterday I even had advice from one stall holder – let us know in the morning or the day before that you’ll be coming to collect and we’ll save it for you.
I would add that, as the recipient of this largesse I am delighted.  It’s not just that I hope, quite soon, to have the best fed worms in the whole of South East London and, in time, a steady supply of compost to improve the soil in my garden.  It’s not even because, until recently, I hadn’t thought to ask.  It’s also because, at a young age, I somehow learnt “not to put people to any trouble” by making a request.  I still have to remind myself that that was then and this is now as part of my preparation for making a request.  And yes, because it’s a request I am learning joyfully to accept a yes or a no.
I know I am not alone.  I invite you to take a moment to ask yourself how often and how openly, you – and others in your organisation – make requests.  And I do mean a request – an open question of someone who might be able to help you and with the option for the person you are asking to respond with a yes or no.  I also invite you to reflect on how willingly you and those you lead own the personal needs that sit behind the request. This is the difference, for example, between saying could we meet at 4pm so that I can get away by 5.30pm to support my partner at home and saying actually, I’m not available at 6pm or maybe even meeting your boss at 6pm and adding it as just one more example to stoke the fire of slow-burning resentment and ill health.
Because yes, there are things that people do to avoid making requests – because to make a request is often to share information about our needs and to open ourselves up to a no and to all the meanings we make of that no.  Making requests can leave us feeling oddly vulnerable, even when we have managed to persuade ourselves that it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
What do we do instead?  Here are just a few examples.  They all come with a price.  Which ones are prevalent in your organisation?
  • Ask a quasi request (“Make sure you check the report before you send it off, will you?”).  The substance of the request is vague, the language is part instruction, part request.  We haven’t asked the person of whom we’re making the request if they can do what we ask;
  • Assume that any half decent member of staff will know what to do and feel angry when they don’t deliver.  (In many organisations staff think this way about their colleagues and even their boss.  In senior leadership roles, we set the tone);
  • Wrap up a request, for example by assigning the need for the request to the organisation rather than honestly reflecting on and sharing our own needs.  Especially when we are in senior roles, this can make it hard for people to say no, though it may lead to all sorts of problems – including a kind of thoughtless obedience or quiet disobedience (yes minister style);
  • Tell ourselves that someone wouldn’t cope or would do their nut (or similar) if we made a request.  This is a great get-out clause – it may be true and, even so, it may mask a more personal reason why we are not making requests.

The approach people have to making requests in your organisation is part of organisational culture and it has significant implications for your organisation’s ability to achieve its aims.  I invite you to a seven-day curiosity exercise – just take time to notice the culture in your organisation around making requests.

Please report back.

  

Unintended consequences of our learning

Coaching, Developing as a leader, ,

Working as I do to support people to develop as leaders, I am often struck by the way coaching continues to add value long after it has finished.  I’m currently talking to a number of former clients about their experiences following coaching and I look forward to sharing what they have to say.

One conversation I had recently reminded me that the experiences that follow coaching are not all positive – at times there can be a bewildering array of side effects and unexpected consequences.  The same truth applies to all sorts of personal changes.  This is what I want to focus on today.

I want to preface my posting by adding that, over time, such challenges tend to “come good” and still, they can be hard to fathom at the time.  Here are just a few of the side-effects that I have experienced personally or observed in others over the years:

  • The “dramatic mistake” when trying something new:  Perhaps one of the greatest fears of someone who is making changes is that they will try something new and that it will go dramatically wrong.  This can range from sharing oneself – one’s opinions, feelings etc. – more fully with somebody close (our boss, spouse etc.), all the way to taking on a new role which constitutes a significant stretch.  In practice, it’s rare in my experience that the most feared outcome materialises and it’s even more rare that the world falls apart when it does.  More often, clients take small steps and discover that their fears were unfounded.  Even when something doesn’t pan out as expected it can be highly liberating to discover that we can make mistakes and still come through;
  • Relationship challenges:  A common challenge that we face when we make changes is difficulties in relationships, be they colleagues in the workplace or our loved ones at home.  I remember, for example, how one of my friends just fell away when I was in the midst of my professional coach training.  She stopped making contact and, when I commented on the change, sent me a letter saying how much I had changed and that she didn’t want to spend time with me any more.  I never knew what changes she was observing or what the impact was on her experience of our friendship.  There is, of course, a balance to be struck here.  At one end of the scale is what we might call the (insensitive) “zeal of the newly converted” – there’s nothing worse than having someone try to impose their new learning on us.  At the other end of the scale are the changes we make gently and slowly out of our growing awareness.  Sometimes the changes we make serve to deepen and strengthen our relationships.  The same changes serve to highlight those relationships that aren’t working.  Over time we may find ways to make them work.  Equally, we may be faced with the question, can this relationship be made to work – or is it time to step away?
  • Facing the truth about an untenable situation:  Coaching can support clients in finding ways to respond to challenging situations, whatever they are.  Perhaps we take steps to succeed in a role in which we were failing or to manage our relationship with a difficult boss.  Perhaps our sales go up dramatically or our profile in the business soars.  At the same time, we may become aware that our situation is untenable even whilst learning to handle it well.  We’re selling more of a product we don’t believe in, for example, or succeeding in a role at the same time as realising it’s not the right role for us.  The immediate joy of making progress can give way to doubts and uncertainty as we go beyond the challenges that brought us to coaching to face some deeper truth.  Coming to the right decision can take time and may happen long after coaching is completed;
  • The pain that comes with growing awareness:  Along the way we may experience feelings of pain and discomfort as we become more aware of things which, previously, were outside our awareness.  Sometimes, these may be the very things we needed to learn ourselves.  Having learnt to be effective in coaching those we lead, for example, our sensitivities are now heightened when we observe how our peers provide instruction without any support to staff.  Perhaps the pain we experience relates to our own unmet needs, especially when we are increasingly aware of them and have not yet found a way to meet them.

Have you experienced these or other unintended consequences of your learning?  It may be a time to get back in touch with your coach for a follow-up session.  It may a time to be attentive – to notice and to get under the skin of your thoughts and feelings to understand what’s going on.  It’s certainly a time for compassion – for yourself, for those around you, including those who stimulate the pain in you.

Inviting you to the spiritual practice of resting

All articles
Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work:  But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.


Deuteronomy
Chapter 5, verses 13 and 14



Every now and then I have trouble sleeping, as I did on Saturday night.  I woke up at about 2 or 3am and struggled to get back to sleep.  No worrying thoughts.  Just an awareness of being tired and yet awake.  I did what I do on these occasions – got up, made myself a cuppa, enjoyed a read for a while and then went back to bed and slept like a baby.  If you read my post on Tuesday you already know that I enjoyed a good lie-in on Sunday morning.


It wasn’t enough.  On Monday, after a slightly late night and a good night’s sleep, I woke up feeling tired and yearning for more sleep.  Almost as soon as I woke up I realised that, had I taken a moment to think ahead, I would have done well to book this week for a break.  Too late – I already had appointments in my diary throughout the week.


It has been relatively restful this week.  Realising how tired I am I have focused on those things that are time sensitive and re-scheduled anything that can wait.  I’ve slept later.  Still, it has been relatively restful but not quite rest.  I am looking forward to four days when I shall put work to one side to spend time with my family, to tend my garden and, well, to rest.


In the Christian and Jewish calendars, the seventh day is prescribed as a day of rest, in line with the commandments which are said to have been handed to Moses by God.  Rest is, in this sense, a spiritual practice and has significance alongside other key practices.  Now you may not be a Christian or a Jew.  You may have no religious faith.  Still, I invite you to pause for a moment to ask yourself:  shall I be putting aside my work this weekend and allowing myself to rest?  If the answer is no, I invite you to ask yourself why.  Perhaps your profession is such that you need, at times, to work when others are not working.  Perhaps you have a key deadline that means that this year, for once, you will be taking some time over the break to work.  Perhaps work is your haven from difficulties at home – a way to keep out of the way of your unhappy marriage or to excuse your absence from a family gathering.  Your reasons have a story to tell – if only you are listening.


I invite you, too, to ask yourself:  do I need time to rest this weekend?  In case the answer is ‘yes’, I invite you to listen.

Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?

About Dorothy

On Sunday, along with my fellow ladies of the London Symphony Chorus, I sang in Mahler’s Third Symphony.

I could almost add “yet again”.  For this was one of countless performances of this symphony which always draws a crowd.  For members of the chorus it is something of an oddity – five brief minutes of singing tucked into this vast orchestral piece.  A brief glance at the reviews shows how little attention this commands from the reviewers if not the audience as a whole.  Rehearsals are similarly tucked away – for who can justify a whole rehearsal for just five minutes of singing?  So, usually, rehearsals for Mahler 3 happen after we have sung some other piece.

I must confess that, having sung this piece so many times over the years I do rather take it for granted.  In the midst of the rather busy affair that is my life I show up for rehearsals and sing before dashing off to the next thing.  Right now, for example, it is spring and time to get the garden going.  I was digging in the garden on Sunday until it was time to get ready to leave home to travel to the Barbican.  Out of my gardening clothes and into my concert gear (long black with strict rules about lengths of sleeves and length of skirt, though anything goes when it comes to cleavage… but that’s another story).

Even the experience of a new conductor had not entirely grabbed my attention.  Our piano rehearsal was brief and efficient and, besides, I was late after getting stuck in traffic.  Our first tutti rehearsal went without incident and our conductor, Semyon Bychkov, let us know that our presence would not be required at the second tutti. We were delighted – travelling into central London on a Sunday morning to rehearse just five minutes of singing is not something we savour.  I, for one, had already planned a Sunday-morning lie-in by the time I left the building.

So, it was not until the concert itself that I got to observe Maestro Bychkov at work and to reconnect with the vastness of Mahler’s Third Symphony.  I noticed that Bychkov’s movements were spare – no grand gestures or expressions of engagement (some conductors are famous for grunting and others for their pained facial expressions).  Instead, Bychkov gave a clear beat throughout and… well, not much more.  Even so, the effect was to bring life and drama to this already dramatic work which was anything but tired under Bychkov’s baton.  The audience’s response reflected the grandeur of this performance.  Some audience members – just a few – attempted applause between movements.  This is definitely “not the done thing” in most London concert venues.  The applause at the end of the concert was, however, strong.

For me, the last word belongs to Mahler.  As I sit and write I am especially moved by the final movement which emerges from beneath the rather jolly singing of the choir and pulls my heart-strings every time.  It evokes a stillness in me, speaking somehow to every longing.

I am reminded of Trish, in the film Educating Rita, who greets her new friend with the words, “Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?”