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When peace breaks out in the workplace

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, , ,
UN International Day of Peace

The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Peace (also known as “Peace Day”) is celebrated on September 21st each year to recognise the efforts of those who have worked hard to end conflict and promote peace.  The International Day of Peace is also a day of ceasefire – personal or political.  But what, you may ask, does Peace Day have to do with your life in the workplace?  The answer is easy to determine.

As you reflect on this question, I invite you to reflect on any relationships you have in the workplace with people around whom you feel less than comfortable.  Perhaps you’ve had an unfortunate experience or experiences in relation to that person, group, team or department.  Perhaps you’d like to enjoy greater ease in your communication with them.  Perhaps the mere thought of them stimulates emotion in you.  You are not at peace.

In all likelihood, your life at work (and maybe at home) is just a little bit harder as a result.  Thinking about that person stimulates thoughts and feelings in you that you don’t enjoy.  Working with them seems to be a real grind.  The tiny impacts accumulate over time, using energy that you could otherwise put to good use and without any real return on your mental, emotional and physical investment.

What would your life be like if you were at peace in relation to that person or people?  How would it be different for you – mentally, emotionally, physically…?  I invite you to imagine how your life would be different and how your experience of life would be different if only you were at peace.  I invite you to take time to imagine this more peaceful life and even to try it on for size.  What does it feel like to be truly at peace?

And here’s a harder question:  what would it take for you to be at peace with that person or people, no matter what their behaviour?  Because here’s the rub:  if you are thinking that your experience is only down to them, you’re giving away your power to make a difference in your own life and, as a result, you’re missing the chance to be truly at peace.  Meantime, the nagging unease, the frustration, maybe even the anger and the fear, continue to eat away at you.  Your ease, your effectiveness and your well-being are all affected.

There’s something more.  As a leader, you need to know how you can achieve peace when faced with behaviours you find difficult because you need to be a role model in this to those you lead.  Your personal Peace Day is an example to your staff.  It also provides the basis for you to coach and support them when they’re finding it tough to get along with their colleagues.

I wonder, what do you take away as a result of reading this posting?  And what are your personal next steps towards living your life in peace?

Photo copyright, iStockphoto.com, Sue McDonald


From another point of view

Emotional Intelligence, ,

Friday, 16th September, 2011.

I was up at 4am this morning to travel to Bonn, arriving in my hotel at about 1pm local time.  Having checked into my room my first task is to find the best possible option for making a 90-minute phone call to the US which is scheduled to take place at 6pm.  I’ve already established a cost of about £800.00 from my hotel room and of about £180.00 from my mobile.  There must be a better way.  The hotel point me to a road which has a number of what they call “call shops” and I make my way to find out more.  Entering the first one I come across I find that the cost is less than 14 Euros – about £13.00.

Is it me or is the manner of the man who answers my questions one of irritation?  I know I’m not looking to pay Rolls Royce prices and still, I’d like a little of what some people call “service”.  I leave with the information I need and walk past Beethoven’s birthplace before a hasty lunch and making my way to the Beethovenhalle where I shall be singing in the evening.  I have special dispensation to leave our rehearsal to make my call and I do this.

In the call shop – a kind of internet cafe – I am directed to booth 6 where I make my call, joining colleagues from around the world.  I am perched precariously on a chair which squeaks noisily every time I adjust my position and still, I am able to participate fully.

When I finish the call my time is tight – my concert starts in little more than half an hour and I have to get back to the Beethovenhalle.  Still, it has made a huge difference to me today to find a low-cost way of making this call.  I take a few moments to thank the man and to tell him how much difference it has made to my day.  He seems surprised and we get talking.  “Sind sie Deutsch?” (Are you German?) he asks.  I say no and our conversation takes a new course.  He asks me where I come from and how I came to learn German and I ask the same of him.  He came from Somalia three years ago and has been grappling with the challenges of this language since that time.  When we say goodbye I find I have, without thinking, extended my hand and we shake hands.

I come away with a different perspective.  The grumpy man of the afternoon has become a human being – someone for whom speaking in German poses challenges and someone, too, who is ready to go beyond the strictly transactional and to connect with another human being.  I wonder how much my own diffidence – both about taking out my rusty German and brushing it off and about about asking the questions of the entirely ignorant as I make my first ever visit to a call shop – were factors in my experience in the afternoon.

Either way, as I look at things from a new perspective, everything changes.

Hidden influences in the world of work

Alternative approaches, Emotional Intelligence,

My nephew, who is an aficionado of QI and a fan of obscure and quirky facts, recently shared a couple from the world of classical music – that Beyonce is a distant cousin of composer Gustav Mahler and that Pierre Boulez  was preceded by a brother who died before he was born and who was also named Pierre.

Boulez’ experience reminded me of the work of Bert Hellinger in the field of family constellations, which suggests that to be named after a dead relative, whilst a loving and well-meaning gesture by one’s parents, can bring unintended and unhelpful consequences as all sorts of aspects of the parents’ experiences – their grief at the loss of a child, for example, or the weight of an increasingly idealised image of the deceased – increasingly become entwined in the experience of the young child.

The principles that underpin family constellations apply as much in the workplace as they do elsewhere in life, so that I was curious a while back to listen to John Whittington sharing his experiences as a constellations practitioner with a group of fellow coaches.  I write on the subject today from the perspective of an interested lay-person, curious about the hidden influences that shape our experiences in the world of work.

There is of course, the direct transfer of our experience of family dynamics into the workplace.  It’s a common experience for even the most senior of professionals to expect their line manager to behave towards them in the way their parents did – or to hope that their line manager will offer something of the love and care they yearned for from their parents but didn’t get.  Such expectations are often outside our conscious awareness, or perhaps we’re aware of them but haven’t stopped to question our assumptions about the relationship between a manager and the person s/he is managing.

Some examples reflect responses to experience in the workplace.  In one organisation, for example, a mistake by one employee cost the company a significant sum of money.  But there was a larger cost:  after the employee was dismissed his colleagues understood that to make a mistake was unacceptable and their assessments of risk included a large and unacknowledged dose of the irrational.  This habit quickly became ingrained in the company’s unwritten rules:  because nobody addressed the issue head on, no conscious decisions were made about what adjustments were needed in the company’s approach to risk and yet many adjustments were made.  These were not always for the commercial good.

In his talk John Whittington gave an intriguing example of constellations, when he described how he had asked a group of students on an MBA course to stand in a circle in order of age so that the youngest would end up standing next to the oldest.  When they did, something didn’t feel right to Whittington and he said so, waiting patiently until one of the group owned up:  they had been lying about their age.

Why does this matter?  To work with constellations is to recognise the hidden forces at play in the workplace and to engage with them – in other words to engage with the full range of information that is available and to shine a light on information that is otherwise hidden.  This opens up new possibilities for making progress in areas where previously the organisation, or people within it, were stuck.  It also opens up the possibility of improved health and well-being for the organisation and those who work within it.

  

When it’s time to look again at your organisation design

Developing leadership across your organisation,

Sometimes, it’s hard to improve on what comes my way so I offer here a brief posting from Seth Godin with a link to some organisation charts of well-known organisations by cartoonist Manu.  Which one rings true for you?

Manu’s funny brilliance aside, this collection of org charts might help you think hard about why your organization is structured the way it is.
Is it because it was built when geography mattered more than it does now? Is it an artificact of a business that had a factory at its center? Does the org chart you live with every day leverage your best people or does it get in their way?

Ten years after the day that became known as 9/11

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It was bound to happen.  Ten years after the day that became known as 9/11, the events of 11 September 2001 have been extensively revisited.  I have been aware of television programmes, radio programmes.  Today I heard a review of a drama on the subject.

So many things have been in my thoughts.  In recent days, I have become aware of facts that were previously unknown to me.  Almost 3,000 people died as a result of the events of that day, for example, of whom about 46 were twins.  I have been struck by occasional glimpses of testimony and especially by the woman – mother of one of those who died – who said her life ended on that day.  I wonder if she knows that, insofar as this is true, it reflects choices she has made rather than some inevitable reality.  I remember the shock of the seeing the first images of the twin towers with flames and smoke billowing from them and finding it hard to comprehend that no, this was not some disaster movie but real life.  I think of so many other events that escape our attention and which, still, affect so many people around the world.

As it happens, just as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, my dear friend Len Williamson sends through a link to an 11-minute talk by Julia Bacha on TED.  Take a look at what Julia Bacha has to say about the world’s interest in nonviolence, he writes, and I do.  Bacha highlights how one community in Palestine successfully used peaceful demonstrations to persuade Israel to move the boundary away from their lands and onto the official ‘green line’ boundary.  She also highlights how little the world’s media does to cover nonviolent action.  If you want your cause to be heard, it may help to use violence.

For better, for worse, those behind the attacks on America’s Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon  in Washington, D.C. wanted to be heard.  If Bacha is right in what she says, there’s just one thing we need to do if we want something different going forward:  to let go of paying attention to violent protest and to train our attention on those who speak to their cause by the means of nonviolent action.

I say amen to that, even whilst recognising that I, too, have a way to go in learning to ignore the violence and to engage without fail in that which is not violent.

Enjoying Beethoven? After the event

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Matthew Rose, Paul Groves, Sarah Connolly and Helena Juntunen

If you’re quick, you can still catch Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on BBC iPlayer following Sunday’s performance as part of the Prom series – just follow this link.

I say this with a little trepidation – as a member of the London Symphony Chorus I was on the concert platform and feeling just a little anxious on the night so I know I gave a slightly less than optimum performance.  The thought of being seen on screen giving anything less than the perfect performance is not easy for me.

And even as I share this, I am fully aware of the folly of such a high expectation:  performance is, by it’s nature, a bit of a messy business – a perfect entry here, a less than perfect ending there.  To think this way is also a form of vanity – as if the experience of members of the audience depends on me and me alone.  In truth, the end result is the sum of the parts just as it is in any other “workplace”.

If the feedback of friends and family is anything to go by, there was enjoyment to be had regardless of any nerves, mistakes and omissions.  Some played “Spot the Dot”  and others bathed in the magnificence of Beethoven’s music.  And equally, I notice how much – as I watch the recording – I enjoy seeing my colleagues sing and with no thought of any mistakes they may be making.

Such is life!  There is always a gap between our perceptions of ourselves and the perceptions others have of us.  There is, too, the risk that we believe our own story about what others might think.

The mistakes are done and nothing about the performance will change.  Still, there is much to enjoy.  The question is:  will I choose to enjoy it?

Go to the funeral – it means more than you think

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Hospitals and funerals are two places we rarely want to go. Even when we feel genuine love and concern for the person involved or his/her family, we’re distracted by how going to those places makes us feel – awkward, afraid for our own health or mortality, guilty, sad or a whole host of other emotions that may arise.


Alan Dobzinski describes how this situation came up for two of his clients – both leaders in their respective organisations. Click through to Alan’s blog to learn how skipping a funeral had huge repercussions for one leader.

Don’t let the bear market ruin morale

Developing as a leader,

Thanks to Carrie Bedingfield, CEO of Onefish Twofish marketing consultancy, I picked up a link to an article on communicating to staff during bad times, called Don’t Let the Bear Market Ruin Morale.  It’s a succinct reminder to leaders to keep communicating with their staff through the bad times with a few thoughts on what and how.

This is a big topic – so much of the way staff feel about their work is down to the way their leaders communicate with them.  And depending on your style of communication and the relationship you create with those you lead, you may or may not get to hear about how they really feel in the workplace.  At the same time, there’s a paradox at work (as there so often is).  Communication is hard work!  And at the same time, the more you get it right, the more your work becomes easy.

How are you communicating with your staff during these hard times?  And to what extent does your communication with staff reflect the way you are communicating with yourself?

Meditating: a personal experience

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Monday morning.  When my alarm goes off it interrupts a seemingly interminable dream of the not-so-pleasant variety.

In the dream, I turn up at 7pm prompt ready to sing in a concert.  I open my bag to find that everything I expect to take out of it – my music, my concert clothes – are not there.  It seems that we are singing with a second choir who have things organised – they are able to offer me a black top with the regulatory below-the-elbows sleeves.  I ask if anyone has a skirt or trousers and several people tell me they’ll check – before disappearing into the dream ether.  I look around me and find the entire contents of my wardrobe seem to be at hand – except, that is, anything black.  7.30pm comes and I discover the concert doesn’t start until 8pm – I have an extra half hour to fill the gaps.  Except that I don’t manage to fill the gaps:  I just have more time in which to feel stressed and run around trying to find clothes and music unsuccessfully.

Waking, I notice how some details of the dream are totally true to life (the bag I open at the beginning of the dream is one I’m using a lot right now) and others are strangely off beam (I am always ready for a 7.30pm concert in time for our warm up, which is usually at about 6.40pm).  Others are, of course, figments of the dream-state imagination.  I also reflect that it’s not surprising to have had this dream at this time.  It’s not just that I am returning to work after a break and face the prospect of several weeks of busy-ness at work and in my hobby as a singer.  It’s also that in the past week my dreams have indeed been varied and vivid.

This seems to have been a side-effect of my time spent at Oxon Hoath on retreat.  This was a brief sojourn – I arrived on Tuesday afternoon and left after lunch on Friday.  Still, I have been meditating up to five times a day.  In the morning, I have done two full meditation rounds before breakfast, comprising ‘asanas’ (simple yoga exercises – not nearly as stretching as the one shown, though this photo tickled me rather), ‘pranayama’ breathing, meditation and a gentle return.  We have also meditated as a group before lunch and then, in the afternoon, I have enjoyed two more meditation rounds.

What does the meditation comprise?  After the preparatory asanas and pranayama breathing, I close me eyes and repeat a mantra that has been given to me by my teacher – over and over for a full twenty minutes.  The effect is a slowing and deepening of my breathing.  As my thoughts arise I simply let them go, returning to the mantra.  Sometimes my thoughts are active – a kind of inner chatter.  Sometimes, my mind is more still.

In our shared discussions, people get to ask all sorts of questions which range from questions about the experience of meditating to questions about the body of spiritual teaching from which the approach springs.  Questions about meditation can reflect or stimulate a certain anxiety (am I doing it right?) which spring from the belief that somehow there is such a thing as the perfect meditation to which we can all aspire.  It reminds me of discussions about sex, except that the word “transcend” replaces the word “orgasm”.  My teachers have always, however, highlighted that every experience is OK.

My own experience seems quite mundane in the moment – a gentle falling away of inner chatter and an increasing sense of peace.  It’s easy to tell myself that in some way I am falling short.  My vivid dreams tell me, though, that something is happening – some release of stress, perhaps, or a greater connection with self.  And if this is the result of just two days’ meditation, how much more is possible over time?  For doesn’t it make sense that, like exercise, the effects of meditating on a regular basis are cumulative, like exercise or gardening?

In truth, even the act of arranging my schedule to make it possible to meditate has an effect.  By doing this I am giving priority to a certain way of being, perhaps even to being over doing.  For to a greater or lesser extent, the act of meditating brings me to greater stillness within myself, or opens my awareness to the greater stillness that is already within.

Meditating on leadership

Developing as a leader, ,

Yesterday was my first day back at work after a short break – spent in the depths of Kent at the Oxon Hoath Retreat Centre on a TM retreat.

TM – or transcendental meditation – is one of the first meditation techniques to become popular in the West.  Like many other ‘alternative’ approaches, it attracts a wide range of responses – from those who revile it, through those who are interested in its benefits from a purely pragmatic point of view right through to those who are deeply versed in the spiritual thinking and teachings that lie behind it.

I fall squarely in the middle of this spectrum (at least for now).  I was attracted to TM as much on the recommendation of a good friend who is also a highly successful businessman as I was for any spiritual reasons – though I do enjoy the opportunity to learn more that is on offer at Oxon Hoath.  My friend’s experience on starting to meditate was typical and included such things as increased concentration and effectiveness.

What on earth, though, has meditation to do with leadership?  Well, quite a lot.  Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, whose careers have focused on conducting research into what differentiates the most outstanding leaders, include a whole chapter on Mindfulness in their book Resonant Leadership.  Why is it important for leaders?  Here’s a quick brainstorm:

  • Practices such as meditation which support mindfulness help to clear the mind, leading to increased clarity of thinking and improved decision-making;
  • Clearing the mind also reduces levels of stress by releasing stressful thoughts and clearing the mind – a bit like clearing a blocked cognitive ‘drain’;
  • Sustaining mindfulness through regular meditation or other activities helps leaders to sustain the high levels of performance needed to lead effectively over time (and to know when it’s time to stop and rest):  mindful leaders can lead effectively for longer periods during the day and over time.
Perhaps at the heart of the benefits for leaders lies the role leaders play in shaping the direction of an organisation or part of an organisation.  How can you shape the direction of an organisation if you are anything but clear thinking – mindful?
If you’d like to enjoy a glimpse into the experience of meditating you’ll find I have more to say in my next posting.  If you would like to look into the possibilities to train to meditate, you might like to make contact with the Meditation Trust, who offer courses in the UK.  Alternatively, Peter Russell’s book The TM Technique is recommended as a very clear introduction.