Tag Archives: emotional intelligence

Lost your temper with your staff? You may have lost more besides

About Dorothy, Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Without fail, singing with the London Symphony Chorus inspires me – and often to write a blog posting.  Sometimes, the inspiration is “not in a good way”. This is the way it was last Tuesday.

It started well for me – I arrived early and listened to young pianist Benjamin Grosvenor rehearsing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor for half an hour before rehearsal began.  He was playing some stretches and some brief extracts – repeating phrases over and over as part of his preparation.  It was a reminder of the many years of practice that lead to concert standard.  Several days later I found myself singing Grieg in my head as I went to sleep.  What a beautiful piece!

Then our 5pm tutti rehearsal started.  A touch of Grieg and onto Carmina Burana.  How quickly things went down hill!  Within minutes Maestro Papadopoulos was expressing his dissatisfaction that members of the Choir were missing and in a manner I found rather unpleasant.  I was having such thoughts as “Don’t take it out on me that some people aren’t here – I’ve made the effort to turn up!” and “If you want me to sing well for you, try treating me with respect”.  I was also having other thoughts I prefer not to share online.  Later, when the raggazi (children) rehearsed their contribution, the Maestro told them how well they’d done – better perhaps than the “famous London Symphony Chorus”.  It was clear he was angry.  So were members of the chorus – as people left the platform after rehearsal everyone’s backs were up.

We had a few minutes with Roger Sayer, in the role of Chorus Director, who was quick to acknowledge our feelings of anger – and also to remind us to sing well for the sake of the chorus if not for the Maestro himself.  Afterwards, as I ate my supper, I reflected on the fears that often lie behind anger – was the Maestro feeling nervous, perhaps?  And I took time to use a well-honed technique to let go of the anger I felt before going on stage.  It was enough to help me to focus my energies on singing well and still, I noticed that I took a little pleasure when the Maestro made a rather obvious mistake during the concert and also that I didn’t warm to those after-the-concert didn’t-you-do-well signs from the Maestro.  Not for me the cycle of punishment and reward!

The trouble is this:  that anger begets anger.  Not anger per se but the expression of our angry thoughts as if they are some inviolable and objective truth. (They’re not).  As a leader we lose our authority and the respect of those we lead when we express our anger in this way.  We also risk losing the best contribution of those we lead:  people need to know that you’re working with them – on the same side – to feel safe to acknowledge their mistakes as well as to risk their best performance.  Far better to play it safe if you expect a rollocking every time the boss is not happy.

I want to be clear:  we’re all angry at times.  So a key challenge for us as leaders – as well as partners, parents, children, human beings… – is to know how to respond when we’re angry.  One of the worst things we can do is to hold on to the idea that somehow we were “right”.  This opens up a widening gulf between ourselves and those we lead.  And in case you’re wondering “what else can I do?” keep reading – I’ll be offering some thoughts during the days ahead with all the humility of someone who, like you, gets angry at times.

Feeling grumpy about an extra day’s holiday?

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,
Learning to kitesurf on Perranporth beach, Cornwall

Picture this, in the midst of your busiest period, your staff – anti-royalists all – are about to benefit from two UK holidays to celebrate Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.  You don’t know how you’re going to meet your deadlines and you don’t feel good about what lies ahead.  The last thing you need right now is an extra day’s holiday.  It could even be that, looking ahead, you’re already cursing the London Olympics – everyone’s clamouring for time off and, what’s more, you are dreading the disruption to travel in the capital and all the knock-on effects that might bring.

Perhaps, though, it’s precisely this thinking that gives you a clue to your need for time off.  Some thinkers might add that you need to get out and play.  The Harvard Business Review’s Morning Advantage recently highlighted a blog posting by Psychology Today about the power of play.  Strikingly, the posting highlights research that suggests that play makes an important contribution to our mental creativity, health and happiness.  The writer says:

There is evidence that play […] may in fact be the highest expression of our humanity, both imitating and advancing the evolutionary process.  Play appears to allow our brains to exercise their very flexibility, to maintain and even perhaps renew neural connections that embody our human potential to adapt, to meet any possible set of environmental conditions.

Overall, the article’s evocation of play reminded me of the rhythm of life during my childhood, when my parents were farmers – a distinctly pre-industrial way of living.  Yes, there were certain things that needed to be done and hours to be kept – milking cows twice a day no matter what.  But there was also time between chores to take a cup of tea or to welcome visitors.  Sunday lunch was always a time for family and friends, for example.  In short, rest, respite and play (including my father’s legendary practical jokes) were woven into life – including working life – in a way that is rare in the modern corporation.

So if you’re at full stretch and feeling stressed in the run up to the Diamond Jubilee perhaps it’s time to step back and notice – how much time do you make for play in your life?  How much do you encourage your staff to take time to play?  Equally, perhaps it’s time to down tools for four days, including your PC and mobile, and just get out there and play.

Managing relationships as a key to success

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Once again, Harvard Business Review’s Morning Advantage has come up with a gem in the form of the article below, with links to further articles:

Debunking the “Proven Winner” Myth

If you were the new owner of a middling National Hockey League franchise, and were looking to bring on a new head coach, you’d probably hire a proven winner, right? Well, according to Glenn Rowe in the Ivy Business Journal, hiring a winner may not be the best option. In fact, there’s a good chance your team will get worse — really.

Data shows that it’s extremely rare for a Stanley Cup-winning coach to replicate his success with a new team — and the same goes for professional baseball and football coaches too. Perhaps one reason is proven winners can’t leverage the “complex relationships” they developed within their old organizations. More bad news: this isn’t just a sports problem. Rowe cites this HBR article by Boris Groysberg, who found that the performance of star stock analysts fell as much as 20 percent when they jumped to a new firm. So what are companies to do? When looking for stars, look within your own organization. Train and mentor them. Work like hell to retain them.


Now you may not know much about the Stanley Cup – I certainly don’t – and still, I’m guessing you get the point.  I notice, too, how there’s advice tucked away for those people who want to be winners.  Kevin Evers, who put this brief article together, doesn’t dwell on it and still – the point is there.  Building and managing relationships is a significant aspect of what makes people successful.


You might be thinking “does that mean I should stay where I am?” or even “but I’ve been here for years and I’m just rubbish at building relationships!”  The point is, once you recognise you need to manage key relationships in your current or future employing organisation, you can start to think about what that means in practice.  Here are a few tips:

  • If you want to build a relationship with others, you need to develop a relationship with yourself.  The more you understand your own drivers and motivations, the more you’ll be able to show insight into the drivers and motivations of others;  the more you are able to be authentic with yourself, the more you’ll be able to be authentic with others;
  • Which relationships?  There are people towards whom you naturally gravitate and these may well become key friends and allies at work.  There are also any number of people who, because of their roles, are important to your success at work – often called “key stakeholders”.  Taking time to understand who you need to be in touch with is a great start in a new job;
  • Don’t just wait until you need someone.  From the beginning you need to establish a relationship.  Make time for coffee.  Let people know you’ve arrived.  Get clear ahead of time about the kind of relationship you’d like to build – on which more below;
  • Every now and then you’ll meet someone – a key stakeholder – and wonder what on earth they’re doing in the job.  And still, they are a stakeholder.  The more your emotions are stimulated when you think about that person, the more that’s a reflection on you.  Learn to build relationships of mutual respect even with the people you think least deserve it.  They have things to teach you as much as you have things to teach them.

I could write more but first, I’d love to know what challenges you face or what you aspire to do in your workplace relationships that you haven’t mastered – yet.  Please leave a comment to share your experience.

  

Finding the Challenge in What’s Hard

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence,

You may have noticed that I’ve been away from my blog for a whole ten days – this is a significant departure from my aim to write two or three blog postings a week.  The truth is, I’ve fallen in to an old pattern – of booking an awful lot into my diary and trusting what looks feasible without trying it on for size.  When I feel my way into the commitments I’m making I have a very different experience of what’s possible.

One of these commitments was a three day “virtual retreat” with Mark Silver and his team at the Heart of Business.  I’ve been working with the Heart of Business for the best part of a year now to explore how best to market my business so that those people who are looking for my help can actually find me.  I’ve been holding the aspiration to create an approach to sales and marketing that feels as fully authentic and nourishing for me and my clients as the work I do – helping leaders in the private sector who want to take the hard work out of achieving results.

I was interested to read a posting by Mark which referenced the virtual retreat, entitled Finding the Challenge in What’s Hard.  Two things in particular struck me.  The first is this:  that early in his posting, Mark related how many people cried on the retreat, saying:

The three days were filled with many insights.  A lot of people cried, including me.  And yes, I’ll go on record as saying that I don’t think it’s a successful event without at least half the participants crying at least once.

As I sit here and think of the people I work with, I notice how many of my clients have been known to shed a tear in our sessions together – male, female, senior and even more senior, tough on the outside… you get the picture.  These are people who live and work in a world peopled by judgements – by an etiquette that discourages emotion (yes, emotion, let alone displays of emotion) – and who have learned to live by the rules of that world.  And still, given permission to be present to their most heartfelt thoughts and feelings – yes, they cry.  I wonder what the world of corporate Britain would be like if there was permission for people to touch base with their deepest emotions.

And there was something else that struck me in Mark’s posting.  He wrote:

I don’t know if it will make you cry, but here’s one deceptively simple and profound insight that will turn your relationship with business around if you take it on.


Ready?  In every place of “hard” in your business, there’s a challenge waiting for you.  If you take it on it will make everything in your business easier and more effective.

  • A challenge to trust, learn and grow.
  • A challenge to let go of beliefs and opinions based on illusion.
  • A challenge to take time to care for yourself with health food, exercise, and spiritual practice.
  • A challenge to choose love over anything that isn’t.

Mark’s clients are different to my own and still, my clients also face challenges.  For instance?

It’s hard to receive the feedback that you’re not ready for a longed for promotion and to receive the feedback as a gift – and harder still to get the promotion and to realise that all the things you used to do are not what you need to do in your new job.

It’s hard to manage the day to day minutiae and still find time to step back and look at the bigger picture.

It’s hard to find space to create your own agenda when so many people are knocking on your door asking you to respond to theirs.

It’s hard to give up doing things yourself and learn to do things with and through others.

It’s specially hard to notice how polished everyone else seems to be when, inside, you’re wondering am I good enough?

Healing the hard and finding the challenge

Here again I borrow from Mark (with delight in his permission to do so – thank you, Mark*):

Take a moment right now and identify a hard place in your business.  Take a gentle breath.  Another.  Now take third one – I promise it won’t kill you.


Now, ask your heart, ask yourself to be shown, with a willingness to be surprised, what challenge is waiting for you within that heard place that will bring ease, joy and effectiveness?


Can you find the “Yes” in your heart to let go of the hard and take on this challenge?


Now, don’t keep it a secret.  Share with us what you got.  What challenge did you find?  Did you find a yes?  What are your first one to three steps for taking it on?  Tell me about it in the comments.


PS  Needing some help?


Perhaps you’ve found a way forward by connecting with the challenge in the thing you’re finding hard.  Or maybe going through this exercise has highlighted to you just how much you’re longing for some tailored support – a place away from work to talk things through, a focus on you and your agenda as well as what’s right for the business, a balance of challenge and support, somewhere you can talk freely and in confidence.

I’ve worked for years with leaders in business.  I’m steeped in leadership theory – I know what it takes to succeed.  More than that, I’ve been a support to my clients as they work out how to succeed in leadership roles – and in ways which work for them as well as the business.

If you’d like to learn more, take a look at my profile on LinkedIn or contact me (details on LinkedIn) to arrange a meeting.

* And just to do the formal bit – extracts in italics are from an article by Mark Silver ©2012, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. In case you’re interested, you’ll find this article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.heartofbusiness.com

When being on the right side of the argument isn’t enough

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence,
Azhar Siddique

It’s Wednesday as I write and I am enjoying the prospect of watching this week’s Apprentice this evening.  It’s a kind of guilty pleasure – how is it that people willingly subject themselves to such a harsh experience?  And that’s before you even think about the possibility that one of them will go into business with the man who has fired all their rivals.

Last week I was out when Azhar Siddique caught the bullet, though I caught up with the programme a few days later and my nephew honoured the unwritten house code – not to share the results before we’d both seen the programme.  Then it was time for the debrief.  Goodness, it was a close one – how did his project manager not get fired?

My nephew, like one of the panellists on the after show, picked up on the fact that Siddique was on the right side of the argument.  Several times he’d raised the question of strategy with his project manager and some of his suggestions, which were ignored at the time he made them, turned out to be perfectly sensible.  One of them was for team members to drop off unsold stock with their fellow team mates before going to the warehouse to restock.  Instead, it went with them to the warehouse and spent time, unsold, in a traffic jam on the way.  But being on the right side of the argument wasn’t enough to stop him being fired.  Why?  Because Lord Sugar recognised that he didn’t want to go into business to someone who – no matter the quality of his insights – could not command the attention of his colleagues.

In his role as founder and managing director of a catering and refrigeration company, Siddique’s style does not seem to be holding him back.  It’s easy to imagine him setting the strategy for his company and following it through.  It’s easy to imagine that some people climb on board in response to the strength of his argument – or decide his business is not the place for him and move on.  At the same time, it has clear limitations.  Even in an organisation’s most senior role we fail – at least a little – both when we imagine we are always right and when we convey our arguments without holding our colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect.  The risk here is that the ideas stop flowing because even the brightest and best of our staff stop sharing them for fear of our response.

In my view it helps to hold colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect even when we are on the right side of the argument.  In the short term, it makes it more likely that we will find a way to share our message which others will enjoy hearing – a way which makes it safe for our colleagues to accept that maybe they’re wrong.  In the long term it builds relationships of safety and trust, in which the question is no longer who is right but what.  With this level of safety people feel able to bring their best ideas to the table and to find out there are better ideas – because they still feel good about themselves at the end of the discussion.  What business doesn’t want the benefit of the best ideas of its staff?

And in case you need just one more argument to convince you, it may be worth remembering that even if it’s the boss who’s wrong, especially when it’s the boss who’s wrong, there are times when your fate lies in someone else’s hands.  Standing up for what’s right can be a powerful and positive choice when you’re at your limits and ready to move on.  As long as you want to stay, it can be highly ineffectual as a way to make things happen in complex structures of people and power.  At best, it can limit your contribution.  At worst, it can lead you to hear the words “you’re fired”.

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.

  

Developing your leadership? Bring on the compassion

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

You’ve got the promotion.  You’re in your new role.  You’re putting on a brave face.  You’re maxing up the ‘positive self-talk’.  Come on, you can do it.  They wouldn’t have put me in the role if they didn’t think I was up to it.  And remember that project for Asia last year – this can’t be more difficult than that.  You know you have what it takes to succeed – intellectually, you know.  But sometimes, the intellectual knowing just isn’t enough.

It gets worse.  It gets personal.  You know that, in order to succeed, you need to make headway in developing new skills.  Perhaps you need to rely less on your technical skills (as an accountant, lawyer, doctor etc.) and cultivate skills in a whole new area – leadership, emotional intelligence, call it what you will.  Perhaps you have to let go of doing what you’ve always done best and start to deliver with and through others.  You’ve always got huge plaudits for your ability to deliver – but can you get others to deliver in the same way?

Maybe it gets even worse than that.  You know – you know – that whether it’s in this job or another there’s no turning back.  Doing everything yourself was barely working for you in your old job – you have to find new ways of working, whatever your job.  You were on your way to burn-out and you know it.  Or perhaps you’d got as far as you could go by getting angry with yourself, or your staff, and you know you’ve got to find new strategies.

The trouble is, you’ve acknowledged the problem – but you don’t begin to know how to address it.  You’re in one of life’s most tender spots – you’ve crossed a threshold and you don’t know where to go.  Joseph Campbell highlighted this aspect of the human journey in his research which I briefly summarised in one of the most often visited posting on this blog, entitled Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey.  Crossing the threshold means stepping out of our comfort zone and accepting some challenge or ‘call to adventure’.  Campbell’s research – into the myths of many cultures on this subject – shows how we have to accept the call to adventure before the resources we need begin to show up.

What’s it like to stand in this most tender of spots?  Recently, a conversation with a colleague reminded me of the feelings that can – if we let them – overwhelm us in this place.  Sometimes, there is intense sadness, grief and loss as we acknowledge the impact on our lives of the choices we have made in the past.  We may be overwhelmed with compassion for our younger self who learned, for example, how to do everything personally rather than to face the ire of a parent or teacher when we asked for help.  We may be sorrowful when we realise just how much this early choice has shaped our lives, keeping us from reaching out for help.  And we may be intensely scared when we think of what we might have to do that we have never done before.

Navigating this stage of our own journeys requires a large measure of compassion, both for the way it shines a light on those areas in which we need to develop and for all the emotions that comes with this.  The language of leadership development – ‘areas for development’, weaknesses’, ‘growing edge’ marches on past this level of emotion with barely a side-glance of acknowledgement.  It helps if we are not alone in holding our emotions in this tender place – if we have a trusted coach, or mentor, or peers, or family.  All the love and support we need is available to us, though learning to receive it may be a hero’s journey in itself.

Campbell talks of the hero but we might equally talk of leaders.  Leaders are made in this place, because they are the people who constantly step across each new threshold as they meet it.  And if they can only stand close to the fire of their emotions, they are also the people who learn how to understand themselves and others – an essential quality if we are to lead others in ways which engage and inspire.

If you want to read more about Campbell’s work, I recommend his books (especially The Power of Myth) and also The Hero’s Journey by Robert Dilts and Stephen Gillighan.  For now, though, I wonder, what are the thresholds you face right now?

Listening to the wild dogs barking in your cellar

Developing as a leader, Developing leadership across your organisation, , , ,
Let me adapt some of Nietzsche’s words and say this to you:
“To become wise you must learn to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar”

Irvin Yalom
Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Dread of Death

I would read anything by Irvin Yalom, which is – far more than its subject matter – how I came to be reading his book Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Dread of Death.  I first encountered his deeply compassionate writings when a colleague recommended his book Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy.  I have enjoyed a number of his books including his novels:  Lying on the Couch made me laugh out loud.

Yalom’s work as a psychotherapist has contributed enormously to his field.  Whilst, historically, some psychotherapists have taken the view that psychotherapy is all about the client, Yalom has understood the impossibility for the psychotherapist of being a blank canvas – a distant and dispassionate observer.  For any man or woman brings a personal history to the role of therapist.  The therapist needs to cultivate self awareness in order not to entangle clients in his or her own unfinished business.

What’s more, dispassion and distance does little to promote healing for the client.  Yalom stands alongside Carl Rogers and others in viewing relationship and especially unconditional positive regard as an important contributory factor when it comes to the success of therapy.  His writings offer many examples of interactions with clients which might well horrify colleagues from other branches of his profession.

Now, since I work as a coach and my clients are leaders, you may well be wondering “what has this got to do with me?”  The truth is that both coaches and leaders need high levels of self-awareness if they are to be effective.  Daniel Goleman (in his book Working with Emotional Intelligence) lists three competencies which are concerned with self-awareness, based on research into what makes us effective at work.  Our self awareness is also the basis for our ability to relate to others – our ability to lead, to influence, to develop others (and so on) depends on our willingness to understand others and this, in turn, depends on our willingness to understand ourselves.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to have empathy for others even whilst recognising the fullness of their strengths, weaknesses, quirks and limitations.  We can only do this if we can view ourselves in the fullness of our own strengths, weaknesses, quirks and limitations.  There can be a paradox here;  for if we believe that excellence in leadership depends on being better than our fellow human beings, we undermine the very basis for our outstanding performance as a leader.

It’s for this reason that the quote above strikes such a deep chord.  When we can listen to the wild dogs barking in our own cellars, we can begin to understand ourselves – and others.  It takes a huge measure of compassion to be present to all sorts of thoughts, feelings, characteristics and motivations which, as children, we have learnt to condemn.  It takes compassion, discipline and dedication.

So, if you want to get by as a leader, you can afford to read this posting – and move on.  If, though, you want to go beyond getting by, I invite you to ponder the quote at the top of this posting.  How willing are you to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar?

Savouring a ‘thank you’

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I’ve had a busy start to the year.  As well as working with a portfolio of coaching and consulting clients I have been on the steep uphill curve of ‘project mobilisation’, conducting a number of assessments for a new client on behalf of my former employer, The Hay Group.  This has meant getting up to speed on a new process and report format with more tiny details than I handle with ease – details which, in any case, have been subject to adjustments along the way.

Last week, I had my final debrief (for now) with one of the people I assessed.  He thanked me for my time and gave unsolicited feedback which he subsequently shared in an e-mail with his line manager and with my colleagues at the Hay Group.  The next day, our project manager sent an e-mail saying thank you to the whole team.

In the midst of so many thank yous I have taken time to reflect on the team of which I am a member.  The central project team have liaised with me to arrange dates, manage the flow of information so that I have everything I need for each assessment and so that our clients get their reports exactly when they need them.  Members of the Hay QA team have provided an essential point of reference as we calibrate our scores across the team and between our own team and our client’s other main provider.  Members of the wider project team have liaised with the client at a high level to clarify what’s needed and provided a flow of information which has also supported the process.  I could go on…

I have also taken time to reflect on my own contribution.  There have been calls ahead of assessments to clarify the context for the assessment and ensure I am well-briefed.  There have been early-morning starts, travelling to meet with clients and conduct interviews and, afterwards the writing of reports and debriefs with assessment candidates and their line managers.  I have employed many skills I have (including interviewing, analysing, writing, coaching) and some I don’t (it’s a miracle I manage to arrive in the right place at the right time – such organisation is a learned rather than a natural skill for me).  I like to think I have done good work and I’ve certainly done it with the intention to add value to each client as well as to support an organisational (promotion) process.

One thing I do notice is this:  that our project manager, rather than say ‘well done’, said ‘thank you’.  Oh!  How sweet this is to my ears!  Perhaps it’s only me and still, I’d much rather hear someone’s appreciation of my work and the difference it has made to them than I would hear someone’s judgement.  To me, the work I do has meaning because it makes a difference to someone or something and this is what I hear in a thank you.

Do you say ‘well done!’ or ‘thank you’ to those you lead?

The dance of honesty – being honest with others

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, , , ,

It’s taken me a while to get to this posting, in which I want to explore what it takes to be honest to others.  Having written three postings on what I’m calling the dance of honesty I am aware that this is a vast subject – I shall touch it lightly today.

Let’s do this together.  Take a moment to think of something you’d like to share with someone at home or at work – something you’d like to share but hesitate to mention.  Notice what you feel when you think about sharing it.  Perhaps it’s irritation because you feel the other person “ought to know”.  Perhaps you feel concerned when you think the other person might be hurt or anxious when you think they might be offended.  It is these feelings and the thoughts that sit behind them that are holding you back.

Having checked in with your feelings, notice the thoughts that accompany them.  Often, when we hesitate to share some truth, it is because we have a sense that there’s some risk involved.  Perhaps there is a risk – you might know, for example, how critical your boss is of anyone who doesn’t share his view.  (I once worked with a leadership team who all told me how they’d stopped sharing ideas with their boss because his ideas always prevailed.  The boss thought his team had no creativity at all).  Perhaps your thoughts echo some old theme in your life, usually from childhood – you always feel anxious about sharing your feelings or expressing an alternative point of view.

This difference – between some objectively identifiable risk and some old fear is important.  If it’s the latter, it may be especially important that you start to take steps which will help you to differentiate between situations you faced way back when and what is true in the here and now.  (That’s a whole other posting in itself).  Either way, though, telling the truth depends on your willingness to face consequences that are – as yet – unknown.  So, right now, thinking about the thing you have not yet said, just notice how willing you are to face unknown outcomes.  It isn’t always easy.

It may not be wise.  Before you speak your truth, you may like to ask yourself, what outcome am I hoping for?  Let’s take the example above – your boss is pursuing a proposal you think is bad for your organisation.  At the same time, you know he’s slow to take on board the ideas of others.  You may have more influence over the outcomes if you take time to think through how best to convey your ideas so that he will hear you.  Perhaps you need to address his main concerns when you share your views – showing, for example, how another strategy may be more effective in boosting sales or reducing staffing costs.  Perhaps you need to speak quietly with others to whom he might listen more willingly – his most trusted colleagues in the business.

If you do decide to speak with him directly, you could do worse than follow some simple guidelines – which I combine from a number of sources (including Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication:  A Language for Life and Roger Schwarz’s The Skilled Facilitator):

  • Build and maintain connection – especially when you’re sharing something difficult for both parties, it’s important to remember to build and maintain rapport.  You can do this in many different ways – by checking in (“how is this landing with you?”), by gently mirroring body language and tone of voice, by seeking to understand what’s important to him or her.  Begin by holding the intention to connect and remind yourself of this intention if things get tough;
  • Focus on interests, not positions – be clear on what needs you want to meet by being honest and be open to the needs of others.  Do what you can to share your own needs and to hear and understand the needs of the other person.  Then you can explore strategies – a path of action – that meets everyone’s needs;
  • Share observations and avoid judgements – you’ll make it easier for the other person to hear you if you share relevant information in the form of observations (“when you said ‘X…'”) rather than presenting your conclusions as the truth.  This might include sharing your thoughts and feelings as observations – there’s a big difference between saying “You’re getting this completely wrong” and saying “I’m telling myself that you’re getting this completely wrong and that makes me feel anxious”;
  • Make clear requests – be clear what response you want and ask for it.  Be ready, too, to accept a “no”.  Equally, be ready to receive requests from the person you are talking with and be ready to say “yes” or “no”.
Whether you are speaking honestly at work or in your private life you may or may not get to an outcome that meets your needs well.  Being honest, though, helps you to test what’s possible.  It may open up a far better outcome than you expected – or provide information that tells your needs won’t be met in the way you hoped.  This, too, opens up the opportunity to explore alternative ways to meet your needs.
I wonder, how does this land with you?