How would you respond to this question?

“How can I help my boss get better as a leader?”

This straightforward question was asked by a direct report of my clients as we were wrapping up our Leadership 360 interview (a series of open-ended leadership questions that help my clients get a clear picture of how their leadership looks to those around them). 

A First For Me

I have been doing these structured Leadership 360 interviews for almost 20 years and have facilitated hundreds, if not thousands, of these 1-on-1 interviews. Not one person has ever asked me that question.  

I found it really interesting that this one dear person cared enough about her supervisor that she would want to know how she could be involved in her boss's development.

My Response

All of my coaching sessions are confidential, including the 360 report and development planning.  I wanted to answer her question, but I needed to be tactful as to not disclose what my client would be working on.

“How do I respond in a way that is helpful for her, without breaking any confidentiality I must maintain with my client? “ I quickly thought to myself.

Here's how I responded...

“I think the best way you can help your boss is by helping him be more self-aware. Now, this is going to require a level of trust on your part, and there could be some risk, so you need to ask yourself if you are willing to take the risk. If you are, then your boss has probably already in some way declared strengths, and things he would like to do better.”

She agreed, so I continued...

“Then help him see when he is doing it. Let's imagine he has told you he is a micromanager and wants to change. Perhaps in the midst of a project, at the appropriate time, you then say to him, 'You know, Jim, it feels to me right now like you are micromanaging me. Is that something you are intending to do?'”

She sat in silence on the phone for a seemingly endless pause.

“I can do that." She finally broke the silence. “Good,” I affirmed her. “Don’t feel like you have to change him, don’t feel like you have to coach him. Just help him see the times where he is doing something he wants to change.”

Helping leaders SEE the change they want to make is perhaps the biggest gift you can give to them.

What About You?

So many of us get caught up in our own development, but I’d like to encourage you to begin looking for ways you could support someone else with their development. Perhaps it’s shifting your focus from helping them solve the problem, to inspiring their awareness of the opportunity right in front of them.

If you feel encouraged and motivated by this post, try asking your leader how you support them in their development. Their response may surprise you and revitalize you in your own self-development journey.

How Would You Answer This Great Question?

“How can I help my boss get better as a leader?”

This straightforward question was asked by a direct report of one of my clients as we were wrapping up our Leadership 360 interview (a series of open-ended leadership questions that help my clients get a clear picture of how their leadership looks to those around them). 

A First For Me

Now, I have been doing these structured Leadership 360 interviews for almost 20 years,  over 800 of them in total.  No one, not one person, has ever asked me that question.  

It’s nothing against the other 800 folks, I just found it really interesting that this one dear person cared enough about her supervisor that she would want to know how she could be involved in her boss's development.

My Response

All of my coaching sessions are confidential, including the 360 report and development planning.  I wanted to answer her question, but I needed to be tactful as to not disclose what my client was going to work on.

So, I thought to myself, how do I respond in a way that is really helpful for her, without breaking any confidentiality I must maintain with my client?

Here's how I responded...

“I think the best way you can help your boss is by helping him be more self-aware. Now, this is going to require a level of trust on your part, and there could be some risk, so you need to ask yourself if you are willing to take the risk. If you are, then your boss has probably already in some way declared strengths, and things he would like to do better.”

She agreed, so I continued...

“Then help him see when he is doing it. Let's imagine he has told you he is a micromanager and wants to change. Perhaps in the midst of a project, at the appropriate time, you then say to him, 'You know, Jim, it feels to me right now like you are micromanaging me. Is that something you are intending to do?'”

She sat in silence on the phone for a seemingly endless pause.

“I can do that." She finally broke the silence. “Good,” I affirmed her. “Don’t feel like you have to change him, don’t feel like you have to coach him. Just help him see the times where he is doing something he wants to change.”

Helping leaders SEE the change they want to make is perhaps the biggest gift you can give to them.

What About You?

So many of us get caught up in our own development, but I’d like to encourage you to begin looking for ways you could support someone else with their development. Perhaps it’s shifting your focus from helping them solve the problem, to inspiring their awareness of the opportunity right in front of them.

If you feel encouraged and motivated by this post, try asking your leader how you support them in their development. Their response may surprise you and revitalize you in your own self-development journey.

What Do You Mean They Don’t Trust Me?

I doubt that too many leaders wake up in the morning saying to themselves, “Gee, I wonder how I can erode my team’s trust today?” If they did they would either be pure evil or would be trying to get people to quit their team. To me, it is almost unconscionable that a person who was able to rise to a level of leadership in an organization would stoop to such madness.

The thing I find interesting in my executive coaching practice are the calls I receive asking for suggestions on what can be done when a leader has lost their team’s trust. So, I did some research on organizational leaders regaining trust and here is a brief summary of what I found.

Steps to Regaining Trust

1. Discern the Error. Since most leaders do not get up in the morning hoping to erode the trust of the team, it is important to decipher what went wrong. How small or large is the impact? Did you go back on your word? Are you making changes that people do not understand? Were changes made that were thought to be temporary but now they seem permanent? If the violation of trust is two-sided then some type of conflict resolution will be needed.

2. Assess the Impact. If the violation of trust is localized between one, or two, individuals then move as fast as you can to rectify the situation. Realize that even if it’s just a misunderstanding, word travels quickly in organizations. Try and remedy this as fast as possible. If the transgression is more systemic, then a more formal, systematic plan may need to be put in place.

3. Admit Publicly The Error Of Your Way...Quickly. Once you’ve identified your error, be prepared to make it right. Perhaps one of the most common trust errors is the perception of the leader using inconsistent standards to evaluate contribution. When this happens a leader needs to apologize for any inconsistency and strive for clarity around the standards being set.

4. Listen to Each Other. No matter if the erosion is localized or systemic, good listening skills by both parties are needed. Avoid trying to justify behavior or explaining your intention. There can be time for that level of clarification later. The thing that is needed most at this point is to sit down, show good empathy and try to understand where the other person is coming from.

5. Be Prepared to Apologize. The leader must have a humble posture in order to grant someone else a higher position than they take for themselves. According to Edgar Schein, this can be difficult for a leader because of the formal power granted by the organization where the follower is just expected to implicitly comply.

6. Follow Up with Compassion. According to trust and communication expert, Irina Schultheiss Radu, leaders need to build cognitive trust by showing they are reliable and dependable to work whatever plan has been put into place. At the same time, the leader needs to build affective trust by showing true care and compassion. (Click here to refresh your memory on cognitive and affective trust.)

When a leader finds themselves in trust-issues situations immediate action is needed in order for organizational effectiveness and efficiency to be restored. Are you currently rebuilding trust with your team members? What actions are you putting in place to recover the path toward trust?

If you are a leader who thinks you have lost trust, or you are forwarding this article to someone you feel has lost trust, take heart. In most cases the trust is recoverable. The path is not easy, but if approached with sincerity, restoration is possible.

Does this really have to be a 4 letter word?

C. O. N. F. L. I. C. T

Okay, so it isn’t literally a “4 letter word,” but in organizations sometimes it feels twice as bad as any four letter word ever would.

Conflict is one of those tension words that has such a negative connotation. So averse that we avoid it like we would someone in the grocery store not wearing a mask.

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

But is it? What is behind this avoidance? 

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

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

Rather than face the hurt or the pain, our knee jerk response is often to avoid. Just like the person in the grocery store who is not wearing a mask and our first thought is not the fact that it is unlikely they have COVID (current respiratory specimen data at this writing is 7.0%) , rather, we choose to avoid them all together. There is over a 90% chance that all is well, but we become paralyzed by the prospect of the pain, so we avoid and miss all the great opportunities that could have been present if we just engaged.

Conflict and Emotional Intelligence

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

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

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

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

First, let me define my terms.

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

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

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

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

So when a deadline came…(and went)… for a project to be delivered, it created a problem. Other teams would be waiting for the work that was now missing. What ensued is what I called tension-smiles.

You can feel the tension of the missed deadline, all the while smiling as if nothing was wrong. 

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

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

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

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

The Strategy 

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

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

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

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

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

Your emotion, your fear, your anxiety is telling you something, but what it is telling you gets misinterpreted.  

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

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

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

Change your OR to AND.

Hold Sam accountable AND maintain the relationship.  

Best Hopes to you on this journey.  It is worth the ride.

7 Steps to Creating Followership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True leadership has followership; not because they have to, but because they choose to.

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

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

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

Are You Creating Followership?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do This and You Will Never Work a Day in Your Life

The last 2 days have been really fun!

Every month I lead an Emotional Intelligence Certification course. The folks who sign up for this course do some pre-work reading, then spend two days with me learning how to interpret and provide feedback using an emotional intelligence assessment. This 2-day class is a very full two days! We start at 9 am and finish at 4 pm both days, and there is some homework in the evening for the participants. In total, probably 12 hours of class time in two days. 

Normally if I spent twelve hours teaching over 2 days, I would be exhausted both mentally and physically.

In addition to spending 6 hours each day certifying people, later in the evening, I led coaching supervision for 2 classes I am teaching for Concordia University in Irvine, California. These supervisions occur with 6 to 8 students and run 2 hours each. There is an intense amount of listening and instructing that goes on in these sessions, to the point that after I lead a supervision course I am usually exhausted.

As I have been reflecting this morning on the certification and supervision classes that just finished, I realized something. I am far from exhausted; in fact, I am energized. 

That caused me to begin to get curious around why.  Why is it after a very intense week of human interaction using video technology I am really full of energy?

What I came up with is not rocket science, and I can assure you there is likely nothing on this list that is a revelation for you:

My List

1. Exercise. My wife and I worked out by either going for a long bike ride or doing our Orange Theory workouts 5 out of 7 days this week. There is something about my workout that gives me energy and life. I don’t always love doing it, but I am coming to realize that I don’t like how I feel when I am not exercising regularly more than I dislike the actual exercise. So, for me, working out is a part of what I do for energy.

2. Diet. Small meals more frequently was the theme of this week. No junk food. Mostly fruits, vegetables, fish, and nuts. When I eat healthily I just feel better than when I eat a bunch of stuff that is processed. I have more energy when I am consistent with my diet.

3. Sleep. 8 hours every night this week. I am actually really focused on this. I am a believer that this one might be more important than the first two on my list. Mathew Walker, in his book, Why We Sleep,  convinced me that we have work policies about smoking, substance abuse, ethical behavior, injury and safety, and disease prevention, but insufficient sleep, another harmful and potentially deadly factor, is commonly tolerated and even encouraged. Too many leaders, according to Walker, mistakenly believe that time-on-task equates to task completion and productivity. This insanity (my words not Walkers) can cost upwards of $54M annually according to a recent study done across four large US firms.

4. Fun. A 2016 study by Barbara Plester and Ann Hutchison explored the relationship between fun and workplace engagement what they found was that workplace fun offered employees a refreshing break and created a positive feeling for the person about their work. If it was fun, they were more engaged in the work. It is what researchers for years now have called “flow.” While it was for sure a long day of “work” for me, what I reflected on was that I was in flow, and it was really fun. 

5. Sabbath. This is an interesting word I think that might not be familiar to all who read this post. Many will see this word and immediately run from it as some kind of religious icon. I don’t see Sabbath that way. The origin of the meaning of the word Sabbath likely comes from the Abrahamic traditions and is associated with the biblical creation story where God creates all of the physical world we experience in 6 days, then on the 7th day He is said to rest. Because of the origin of this story, some will reject the idea out of hand. Others will make it an idol and will worship the day and miss the point entirely. To me, the Sabbath is an experience where I rest and live my life differently from how I live it the other 6 days of the week. I set it apart and rest in it. For me, it includes worship and meditation. It might include a different form of exercise, or cooking a meal I wouldn’t normally cook. It is not a set of rules or do’s and don’ts but it is an idea where the day is different. I really like what Dallas Willard is quoted as saying, “If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.”  I took Sabbath last week.

So, that is my list. Nothing earth-shattering, but I think the difference this week is that I did it! I didn’t just think about doing it. I didn’t just have the head knowledge that it should be done. I actually DID these things.

As a leader, I suspect there is nothing new under the sun you need to do to “never work a day in your life.'“ But there might be something you need to experience that you already know.

By the way, I am going on vacation next week. Which is another form of Sabbath for me!!!

I will still have a post but will write it in advance so I can really detach and rest. Now as my good friend Mike Risinger says about vacation…"detaching and resting”…now that sounds like fun!!

Have a safe and happy 4th of July. Get some rest!

5 Strategic Inflection Points for Leadership Development

“A strategic inflection point for a business is when its fundamentals are about to change. They are the result of an event which changes the way we think or act.”

- Andy Grove, ex-Chairman, Intel

An awful lot has been written over the years about the growth curve for business. We tend to marvel at the meteoric rise of organizations like Amazon while at the same time wondering what happened to great powerhouses like Sears.  

It is so fascinating that for years before Amazon came on the scene we could order things from Sears and have them mailed to our house. While I understand that Amazon has created a digitized experience, I can’t help but wonder how the executives at Sears did not see this trend and buy Amazon in its first year.

It really is amazing that some of the real organizational giants in our world have struggled, even becoming eclipsed, by small, innovative organizations that captured the hearts and minds of us all. 

I was reading an article recently that tried to give some rationale as to how and why something like this could occur. I mean, who would have ever thought that the powerful General Electric (GE) would be removed from the Dow 30?

But in June of 2018, this very thing happened when Walgreens was added. GE was taken off because it no longer reflected the market, which was going up while GE was going down.

In fairness, GE is still a viable organization with lots of dedicated employees, yet there is no denying it is not doing as well as it had in the past. The reality is they never recovered from the 2009 crash. It took a bailout from Warren Buffet and the government to keep them solvent and they haven’t recovered overall since that downturn. 

Application for Leaders

As I was reflecting I began to wonder… if this could happen to GE, could it also happen to the leaders I interact with and coach?

And the truth is, it could! 

Here are 5 things to consider as you innovate and develop:

1. Find one way to innovate within your current role.
   
   When most of us think about innovation we begin to feel overwhelmed and find it hard to conceptualize. Some consultants tell us to “think outside the box” if you want to innovate. However, Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg recommend just the opposite. They claim in their book, Inside the Box, that more and quicker innovation happens when you think inside the box. Rather than having to create a whole new job for yourself that no one understands, why not just put a couple of Boyd and Goldenberg’s strategies together and innovate your current role?

   1. Option 1: Stop doing one thing in your role that that was likely essential at some point but no longer is. Perhaps you work on a budget every month that no one looks at or makes comment on. What if that task just went away? Would anyone miss it?

   2. Option 2: Unify tasks. Maybe there are meetings you are having with 3 different people that you could combine into one meeting. Or maybe you are traveling to meetings in person and you could be doing it over video conference.

2. What one piece of critical feedback are you lacking?
   
   In a recent experiment people were asked to skip a meal and then entered a room where chocolate chip cookies had been baking. Half of the people were asked to eat 2 or 3 of the delicious cookies and the other half of the folks were asked to refrain from eating cookies and eat 2 or 3 radishes instead. Later all participants where asked to solve some fairly complex geometry problems. Those asked to refrain from eating cookies gave up twice as fast on the geometry problems as their counterparts. The researchers concluded that attention and effort goes into resisting temptation and leaves less energy and attention for other tasks. Douglas Stone and Shelia Heen, in their book Thanks for the Feedback, say this has important implications for our efforts to act on feedback we get and to change behavior. Feedback can be “accurate, timely, perceptive, and beautifully conveyed” (p. 258), but if it involves too many ideas to keep track of or too many decisions or changes, it is too much and nothing will happen. Instead of seeking out complicated feedback and writing complicated development plans, simply get feedback on the one thing you could do better and innovate around that.

3. Read the Organizational Signposts
   
   What are the trends in your organization that are destined to become imminent inflection points? Are you noticing that more emphasis is being put on relating to the customer rather than driving sales? If so, what changes do you need to make to become an innovator in this new behavior? Maybe you were the top performer in whatever you did 3 years ago, but it might not be relevant today unless you continue to innovate and grow.

4. Play Your Strength Card
   
   A lot has been said about this one over the past few years regarding how important it is to be yourself and focus on your gifts and talents. I agree with most of this, but what often gets left out of the equation is how to use these strengths to do the little things really well, better than everyone else, without drawing attention to yourself. I harken back to the great John Wooden, basketball coach for UCLA, who said, “High performance and production are achieved only through the identification and perfection of small but relevant details, little things done well.” How are you using your strengths to do the little things really well?

5. Take a 3 year view on the future.
   
   We all get caught up in the day to day and the quarter to quarter, but I wonder what would happen if we set our pride aside and really asked ourself what might be different in the next three years that could make our career obsolete. What about 5 years or 10 years down the road? At some point, someone is going to come along and do your job better, faster, or cheaper than you are.  I think what my wife is doing right now is a great example. She is an online teacher for VIP Kids, a company that gives english lessons to children in China. Sitting in our home in Orlando Florida at 6:30am she is doing half hour lessons for children in Bejing who have just finished dinner at 6:30pm. Teachers, if you don’t think that your students couldn’t be sitting at home getting the same lesson, I ask you…why not?  All of us need to be ready to upgrade our skills to prepare for whatever revolution is coming our way.

I can remember reading a book by Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, on the topic of management and leadership back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Organizations were changing how they evaluated performance based upon what Jack was doing at GE. After all, between 1981 and 2001 during Welch’s tenure the company gained 4,000% in value. Then 2009 hit and today GE has lost more value since 2016 than it is worth today, only about $88B from an all-time high of around $500B.

If it can happen to GE, Sears, and other icons, it can happen to you, no matter what kind of performer you are currently in your organization.

Start innovating and developing your own career today.

7 Step Organization Culture Checklist

I have been thinking a lot about organization culture this week because a client I have worked with for a number of years has been given the opportunity to build an organization from the ground up.  When she asked for my help with this project I was simultaneously excited and terrified.  

I was excited because I have a lot of education and experience in working on organization culture. When I was first named a manager 25 years ago I learned what it was like to be inserted into an existing culture. As a consultant, I have had several projects where I helped leaders better identify cultures they have created, then worked with them to make changes in those cultures.

On the other hand, I have never built an organization of any size from the ground up, and being presented with the opportunity to help do so was terrifying.

At this point I had a choice to make.  

I could see myself as an expert and rely on my experience. Experts have very narrow mindsets. They rely heavily on their knowledge and experience to inform the decisions they are making.

OR

I could take on the mindset of a beginner.  Those who have the mindset of a newbie know nothing, literally nothing, about the topic.

I decided to forget what I know about culture and take on a beginner’s mindset.  To do this I thought it might help for me to experience what it is like to be new at something I know nothing about. 

Playing a Guitar

I have to admit to you all that I literally know nothing about music unless it is how to turn on my TV and watch The Voice on NBC.  Seriously, that’s it.

I thought this fit the definition pretty well for me of having a beginner’s mindset, so I did what most of us do these days when we know nothing - I went to YouTube and searched for “guitar lesson 1.”

The expert I clicked on took for granted way too much for a person who knows nothing! He started talking about using three fingers to make a D note and to not get your fingers directly on the fret and said you count the number of fret’s from the nut.

This is exactly what I wanted! I wanted to experience what it was like to have a beginner’s mindset and experience an expert’s teaching from a level that is too high. My goal was to experience what it felt like to know nothing, struggling to learn something new when you don’t comprehend.

Being a beginner is really humbling. It takes patience, persistence, and a real thirst to learn what it is you are trying to better understand.

Building a Culture

I am hopeful that my approach to learning how to build a culture goes a bit more smoothly than what I am experiencing with the guitar. 

I also realize that many of you are not building a culture from nothing; so I wanted to reframe my search as a checklist you can use to assess how the culture of your team is growing.

As always, I started my quest in culture building in the academic literature. I found a lot of information on organization culture, but surprisingly little on building culture from the ground up. What I did find were ideas on what needs to be incorporated into organizational culture.  

Here are seven of the items that stood out and seemed to flow together for me:

1. Mission: Should describe what you are doing and who your team is designed to serve.

2. Vision: Articulates succinctly your future destination.

3. Purpose: The unselfish reason for being; who you are impacting and how lives are being changed by what you do.

4. Values: The fundamental subjective beliefs that guide behavior through emotional investment giving guidance to right and wrong, good and bad, how to interact with constituents and engage with customers.

5. Guiding Principles: Objective, prescriptive truths around expectations that provide a sense of direction for all involved.

6. Projected Story in 3 segments:

   1. Adventure-Three years from now what do we want to be said about us?

   2. Legend-Seven years from now what to we want emulated by those copying our success?

   3. Epitaph-Fifteen years from now what do we want to be remembered for?

7. Behavior: Observable actions that can be articulated accurately by people

   1. Who are new to the organization

   2. Who just left the organization

   3. Who are outside the organization
      
      These behaviors should ultimately match the first 6 descriptors if we are managing our culture accurately.  

I would love to know what you all think on this topic. Drop me a line and give me some feedback on what you think about this checklist. If any of you use this as a checklist with your teams, I am interested in what you found. Until next week….

An Open Letter on the Leadership Skill of Coaching

“Every now and then, someone asks me for advice on how to become a writer. If I am on my game, I don’t offer advice. Instead, I ask questions in hopes of evoking my conversation partner’s inner teacher, the most reliable source of guidance anyone has.” 
Parker Palmer, “On the brink of everything; Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old”

I really love this quote by Parker Palmer because his world of being a writer is my exact experience of being an executive coach.

Last week’s blog discussed the topic of coaching and helping others see what behaviors they need to change by thinking about what things they need to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing.

I received the following note from one of my readers who is a nursing leader at a rather large hospital system in the midwest:

Scott,
Great timely article!!  You know how each year God seems to pound you with a “word” for growing? Well I would not say this is my spiritual word, (although it could be lol), but I  do believe this is my professional one.  COACHING….  Coaching women is so much more comfortable for me spiritually than coaching my young employees professionally.   

Because they have all have been doing their jobs much longer than I have their knowledge base about standards, compliance, and overall  ambulatory (verses hospital) experience far outweighs mine.  For the first time in my career I feel gun shy on this skill. 

Question:  Should coaching be incognito?  Meaning, do I say “this is coaching”?  When I read the three questions in today’s blog, I wonder… are these my reflection/ assessment of them or are these behaviors that they believe need to change?  

Here was my reply:

Dear Carolyn,

I always love your insight and your interaction with my writing. I want you to know you make me a better writer when you ask probing questions like this.

I actually think "coaching" has become a catch all phrase for interacting with people. So I do think it is important to know how you distinguish coaching from other types of conversations.  I actually had someone say to me one time that coaching is nothing more than what we used to do with friends when we had a deep conversation.  Frankly, I completely disagree with that sentiment!

Coaching is a specific set of skills that allow you to take someone from where they currently are (think behavior or performance) to a place THEY want to be.  It can be formal or informal, but the focus is THEY have to want it. 

The coachee has to see the need to change the behavior and then want help in getting there. 

When deciding whether or not I am going to coach someone, the first thing I must understand is their motivation for change. If they are motivated, then I can help. If they are not motivated, then I will decline the client gracefully. 

I know this is different in my world than yours. You are often asked to coach people who may not (at least at first) want or even see the need for the change.  I am of the opinion then that your task becomes helping them see the need for change.  Not motivating them, but inspiring them to see the change which could be of such great benefit to them. 

The more I am in the field of executive coaching the more convinced I become that if the person is not motivated, then the likelihood of getting any kind of sustainable change is negligible. You can get short-term behavioral compliance when offering extrinsic motivation like more money or time off, but this is transactional and possibly even a bit coercive. At best, it is authoritarian with an obvious power gradient.  As coaches what we want to be is inspirational and transformational for those we work with.

Now to a second element in your question I noticed: experience.  You have more than enough through your long career in nursing and leadership. They may have more functional experience based upon your current assignment, but you have more leadership experience.  

We must start to see leadership (of which coaching is a tool) as a discipline, just like nursing is a discipline.  Just because someone has more nursing experience does not make them a better leader. These are very different disciplines.

Have confidence in yourself that you can lead them and lean on your faith and your experience as a leader. 

This is why when people ask me if someone will be a good executive leader the first question I ask myself is “If I take them out of their functional area as a leader and drop them in another functional area, could they thrive?”

So, for example, could I take someone like you out of nursing and put you in another area in the hospital to lead? Say outpatient Emergency Room (ER). You may not have functional ER experience, but you have leadership. In a short time you can learn the management or functional side of ER.

I may not put you in as an ER nurse, or a nurse unit manager, but I would put you in as a leader. Knowing you like I do, I would have no hesitation in doing this tomorrow.

Finally, a third element you asked about are the 3 questions (Getting people to Start, Stop, Continue behaviors); are they reflections or discussions.  I think the answer is yes! 

As a coach you need to have in mind what behavior someone needs to stop doing. The interesting thing here is you can not ask a human to stop doing something without starting a new behavior.  Think getting people to stop smoking. We can not just ask them to stop, but we need to give them something else, something less harmful to do, like START chewing gum.

The one thing I have learned over my years in coaching is behaviors have to be substituted to get the change desired.

I think a good coach will have reflected on this and then thought through the STOP and START needed. This reflection is vital if you are going to serve the person you are coaching well. Then, after reflection, I think you enter into discussion with the person to gauge their level of motivation and desire for the change you are going to ask them to make.

My Goal

As a coach I want to be more like Parker Palmer.  

The main reason I wrote this post is that I realized after I had hit the send button on my email back to Carolyn that I did not ask her one question about the email she had sent.  I fell right into giving some light advice.  While I will admit that doing this really stroked my own ego and made me feel pretty good that someone in a leadership position like Carolyn would ask me a question about a topic I am passionate enough to write about.

But I quickly realized that I fell right into that old trap of giving advice instead of stimulating Carolyn’s “inner teacher.”

Carolyn, I do hope you will forgive me.

Parker, I will try and do better next time.

Are You Ensuring This Happens After People Are Trained?

I have recently been working my way through a very interesting book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It is a very interesting perspective on founding, buying, selling, running, and investing in technology companies. The book is not really steeped in a lot of sound leadership theory, but is more about his own practical wisdom in working and leading in the technology space. 

One of the things that caught my eye was in a small section he wrote about employee retention. According to Ben, during his tenure at one of the tech companies he founded he decided to read all of the exit interviews for the entire company. He was amazed at the amount of money they were spending on talent recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding only to see this open drain on the back end of the company. It seemed they were losing people as fast as they could hire them.

According to Horowitz, when you put the economics aside (I assume he means people who say they are leaving for higher paying jobs that his organization couldn’t compete with) there were two primary reasons why people left:

1. They hated their direct manager. They often cited things like:

   • Lack of guidance

   • No career development

   • Feedback they received

2. They were not learning anything. 

He then goes on to make a case for the importance of training new employees to resolve some of these turnover issues.

Insert Coaching Here

While I am all for making sure that all employees get adequate training in their role, my experience is that training is just not enough. You can’t simply send employees to a training program and expect that your turnover numbers are going to go down. 

Horowitz quotes Andy Grove, the legendary CEO at Intel, who makes the economic case for training by saying that if a manager did a series of 4 lectures for their department, assuming 3 hours of prep for each hour of material, that is 12 hours of work in total. Say you have a department of 10 folks and next year they will work about 20,000 hours for the organization. If you get a 1 percent improvement in performance, the company gains about 200 hours of work as a result. It is easy to see the ROI by inserting a salary for the department and subtracting the managers salary-time.

I would like to take Grove’s ROI calculation one step further and insert coaching after the completion of training. 

Let’s assume that a manager then does two one-one one meetings each month with each of the employees on the team. Half of the time for these meetings is dedicated to coaching the employees after the training.

The manager has had plenty of time to observe the employees, evaluating their use of the training delivered. The manager can now use the observed behaviors to coach any little improvements that will help the employee become more productive.  

Let’s assume that this manager is really not that good of a coach, but is able to eke out another 1% of productivity from each of the employees as a result of the coaching. This becomes another 12 hours of work on the part of the manager (2hrs/month/employee + 10 minutes of prep on what coaching is needed).  Now another 200 hours of work improvement has just occurred as a result. 

Now we see that 4 hours of training (a one hour training session per quarter) and one hour of dedicated coaching to the training results in a net increase in 400 hours of productivity for the organization!

No Time for Training or Coaching

I had a client tell me one time that he just really didn’t have time to train or do one on one meetings with his team. The team had way too many tasks and priorities to take a break from their work to do any of this kind of development.  

The interesting thing to me was that I was hired as an executive coach to work with this person because the turnover rate in his organization was so high that those who were left were forced to take on the projects of the folks who were exiting.

This manager was symptomatically trying to solve his productivity issues by moving projects around on some kind of organizational chess board.

Instead of making the investment in the people to reduce the turn-over rate, the manager just wanted the folks who were left to work longer and harder. 

When I did an interview 360 and talked to this manager’s peers and the folks on his team, he was not very well liked or respected. One person I interviewed told me the manager was often quoted as stating “The workload will stay high until the teams performance improves.”

There was no coaching, no positive feedback, and no feeling of being developed. 

My job as this manager’s coach was to help him see that his unwillingness to invest in coaching the team was the productivity drag on the department. 

How about you?

Do you have 1 hour per quarter to provide a training for your team and 3 hours of follow-up after the training to get a 400% increase in your team’s productivity? 

Or does your team have so much to do that there is no time for training and coaching? 

Stay tuned for next week’s post where I am going to take on the topic of Good Coach/Bad Coach. I think this is a really important topic for those of you who buy into the importance of training and coaching and think you are good at it... Just because you do it, does that mean you are skilled?

Do You Share These Observations Regarding Leadership Momentum?

There are not many folks from about mid-December through mid-January who are wanting to engage in new coaching or training opportunities, so each year I use those weeks for reflection and planning. 

In addition the clients I am currently working with, I am regularly adding new coaching clients into my practice throughout the year. With that in mind, an important area to reflect on as one year ends a new one begins is the future of my coaching practice. How many new clients will I engage this year? Who will they be? What will my coaching practice look like in the coming months? It is important to thoughtfully reflect on these questions in order to determine how I can proactively plan for a successful year for both myself and my clients.

Another area of my professional life that I reflect on is the work my clients have asked me to do with them. I begin by looking at my calendar to observe all the work I did in the past 12 months. I look at all the times I spent teaching, training, facilitating, coaching, creating content, etc. Then, I ask myself a really hard question: Is the work I am doing still relevant? Is it meaningful for those who call on me to work with leaders in their organization?

Finally, I spend time in personal reflection and journaling. Perhaps most importantly, reflecting on how I spend my time, then comparing this data with what I really enjoy doing in my work life.

Momentum

One way to look at whether or not I am relevant is by using the idea of momentum. This is a concept that I borrow from the world of personal investing and finance.

One of the personal finance newsletters I read on a very regular basis is Sound Mind Investing. (You can learn more about them at www.soundmindinvesting.com.)

In the January 2019 newsletter, Matt Bell writes about the concept of momentum. According to Matt:

“A fundamental mistake many investors make is to move too quickly in choosing investments. They read about a hot stock or this year’s best performing mutual fund and jump in. It’s all very ad hoc and reactive.”

Matt goes on to write that “Momentum is the idea that the recent past performance tends to persist-that is, it tends to continue, at least into the near term future.”

This means that what has happened in the recent past is likely to continue into the near future. It is what we know to be true from the world of physics; that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest stays at rest.

Momentum in the financial world becomes an objective measure of what is going on in the marketplace so that the investor can build a strategy based on real data and not just turn on the TV and be moved to buy a stock by some talking head in the moment.

Momentum Analysis

As I analyzed my journaling from this past year, here are 4 things I noticed:

1. Emotional Intelligence remains an important leadership construct. This is true for both the training work I do as well as the coaching. Most of the time when leaders hire me there is some growth desired in this area. I think Dan Goleman got it right when he wrote, “What really matters for success, character, happiness, and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills - your EQ - not just purely cognitive abilities…” Organizations put so much emphasis on how smart and skillful people are that they often miss this other very important dynamic of the “how” they work with others.

2. Relational empathy. I don’t know if this is a symptom of our political climate or not, but people have become so polar. They have an idea or a framework for how the world should be and they stick to it no matter how silly it makes them look. Maybe this is a natural outcome of divisions of labor, where those trained in finance wear finance glasses and only see the world through finance. Or, how those who are trained and educated in marketing only see the world through a marketing lens.  As leaders we seem to have lost the skill of trying to understand where the other person is coming from, and, even more important, what it is like to be them. We are so concerned with our own selfish ambition and desires that we have lost sight of the perspective of other ways of seeing and doing.

3. Being flexible in ambiguous times. I was on a call with a potential client toward the end of the year whose organization has been turned upside down. Half of the people have either been laid off or reassigned new roles. There is a tremendous amount of ambiguity about what certain jobs actually are and what people are supposed to do everyday. I was asked to talk with the team about the impact of emotions during times of tension and what to watch for as leaders when working with others. I was interrupted with a question in the middle of my presentation when one well meaning soul said, “Dr. Livingston, enough already about helping people process the loss they have experienced, can you just help us get to a place where things are normal and we can all just get back to work?” My response? “This is your new normal. Learning to be emotionally flexible and helping people deal with where they are in the moment is a new calling for leaders.”

4. Connecting with talent. The December stock market slide, not withstanding the economic outlook and, more specifically, the jobs outlook, is really robust. Senior leaders need to make sure they are connecting with talent, because my sense is that talent is itching for new opportunities. I think senior leaders need to get much better at proactively scheduling time to connect and care about the talent in the organization. Take them for coffee. Schedule a lunch. Learn what is on their mind. You do not need to do another ROI calculation on some process. What you really need to do is ensure you have the talent on your team to turn the future you are planning for into a reality.

How about you? Do you agree with these 4 observations? Leave a comment or send an email. I would love to connect with you to talk about these observations, or your unique observations regarding your organization.

Best hopes for the coming year,

Scott

A Prescription for Being A Wise Leader

Because it is Christmas Eve I am fairly confident that if you are reading this post at all, you are in one of three places:

1. At work regretting not saving one more vacation day this year.

2. Others assume you are working, but that you have scheduled yourself at an “offsite meeting” of undisclosed location.

3. On vacation, but just couldn’t help yourself and had to check your email because it is a Monday morning.

No matter where these thoughts find you this day, I want to note that this post is a little different than my usual organizational leadership musings. So, you have been warned.

Perhaps this is because as I am writing this my own heart and mind are turning to the Christmas holiday and the precious time my wife Kim and I will get to spend with our kids, their spouses, and my adorable granddaughter. However, our time with our family will not start until later on Christmas Day when our daughter and her husband arrive at our home in Florida.

This means that today, on Christmas Eve, if you are opening this post early, Kim and I will be at the gym for our morning workout. If you are reading midmorning I then will be having a brunch meeting with my good friends Bob and Pat who serve in ministry at Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU). Or, if you decided to sleep in and are reading this later in the day, I will likely be off to a matinee with Kim before we head to our Christmas Eve service at church.

I have to admit that one of my favorite church services all year is Christmas Eve. 

One thing I really I love about the Christmas Eve service at almost any church I have ever attended is that it is almost guaranteed that the song “O Holy Night” will be sung.

There is just something about this song that sends a chill down my spine. I get this huge adrenaline rush as the song begins slowly;

 “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of the dear saviors birth.”

Even as the song begins I find myself lost in the lyrics. Then the song builds in intensity as it moves along until it hits the crescendo verse still remembering that special night;

“O night divine,” the verse repeats softly and slowly, “O night divine.” 

What I love about this song is that it implores us to remember that night, and not only to acknowledge it but to remember it as something really unique in the history of the world: a savior was born for man to come back into relationship with God.

I have been thinking a lot recently about why that song is so impactful for me, and I think it is because the song takes me to a place in my mind that I do not go to enough…my imagination.

I am so evidence and fact based in my approach to leadership development (and life) that I often miss that creative, imaginative side of who I am.

So, why am I writing this to you as practitioners and gurus in the field of organizational leadership?

Because I don’t want you to miss this very important aspect in leadership that just does not get enough press these days…wisdom in leadership. 

We put so much focus on effective leadership I often wonder if we are missing the boat in doing so. I would argue that perhaps we need to be less concerned with how effective our leaders are and put more emphasis on how wise they are!

So, how do we evaluate wisdom in ourselves as leaders and in those we lead? Here are five things you can use from the wisdom leadership literature as a checklist:

1.  Wise leaders use careful observations and reason to reach better decisions.

2. Wise leaders take into account not only rational and factual evidence, but also non-rational aspects such as emotional intelligence, foresight, and imagination. 

3. Wise leaders value humane and virtuous outcome. 

4. Wise leaders make decisions that are practical and oriented towards everyday life.

5. Wise leaders understand the aesthetic dimensions of their work, are articulate when communicating, and believe in contributing to the good life of all.

Perhaps the most notable in this list is number two, so don’t miss it -- wise leaders take into account both the rational and the imagination.

My hope for you this Christmas season is that you will be awestruck not only by the evidence that you can see, but also that you are amazed this season by your own imagination. And, in doing so, that you would find yourself growing in wisdom as a leader.

Take in every moment this holiday season and let your heart be filled with gratitude and wonder.

Be blessed.

How to Create Excitement In Hiring

I had a quick meeting with a very good friend of mine the other day and the upbeat tone my friend shared really made me stop and think. I was inspired to write down what I was observing and I’m wondering if perhaps you might feel the same way I did by the end of this post.

I saw my friend at the end of a very long day for both of us. I asked a quite boring question, “How did your day go today? Did you do anything interesting?”

Her response was so enthusiastic it actually took me back a bit!

I knew she had delivered an important presentation to her leadership team because she had talked about it the day before. 

“So the presentation must have gone really well,” I said. 

“Oh, the presentation…” there was some hesitation in her voice. “Sure, it went just fine,” she said, but that was almost 9 hours ago! I’m excited because I just got out of the most amazing interview with a candidate we are thinking about hiring. I was asked to sit in on the interview sort of at the last minute so I did not even get the person’s resume beforehand. I was feeling a bit unprepared, and frankly, it was the end of the day and I was feeling a bit tired.”

“Well that doesn’t sound all that exciting,” I interrupted.

“But it was!” she said. “When the young lady walked into the room she had such an air of confidence about her. She stepped right up, shook my hand, and presented me with a copy of her resume. During the next hour she talked about her education and her experiences, which were an exact match for what we needed.”

Then, my friend said those magic words that I love to hear when a leader is making a hiring decision…

“My only regret is that I know she won’t be in the position long. She is just too good! People will quickly see in her what I see and within 18 months she will be promoted!”

I know what my friend is talking about when she says regret.

Not the kind of feeling you get when your dinner companion orders something off the menu that turns out to be way better than what you ordered. 

This kind of regret is a result of knowing that the person will do so well in the role will not have the opportunity to work with them long enough to learn what you could from them. 

I do hope as you read this post you are thinking of a particular person you have hired in the past that has moved on to a higher level. Organizations are like that sometimes. They take away from us some of the best relationships we have ever had and it seems like things will never be the same.

I have two folks in mind that I have worked with over the years and I am going to jump on LinkedIn later today to send them each a message and tell them what a joy it was to work with them.

How about you? Maybe simply sending a note to someone will make their day!

I am so happy for my friend as she hires a person she is so excited about. Is it possible that is really the standard we need to shoot for in hiring?

There are likely many people who can do a job, but if you are hope to form a high performing team, maybe there is more to it than just a competent person. That connection where you know they are the exact right person for the job ought to be considered as well.

For those of us who do some hiring but also have other career aspirations, what do we need to do to be that person who creates such excitement?

If you have thoughts on that, I would love to hear from you!

Focus on BOTH Performance AND Mastery: A Development Suggestion for Leaders

It happened to me again.

I cannot believe it caught me off guard, but it did…again.

A student I have been teaching in an executive coaching program asked for some time to talk with me. This student has been doing quite well in the course, but wanted to discuss an issue they were facing.

Usually when this happens the student has one of two types of concerns.

The first is that the work they are doing is not up to expectation and they want to know what to do about it.

The second is that they have told people they are in this coaching program and have received an inquiry about doing some work for a potential client.

This call was not one of the usual scenarios, and so it caught me a bit off guard.

“Dr. Livingston, I have never been a CEO or even led a team of more than five people. Why would anyone ever hire me as an executive coach? I have been doing very well in all my coursework and I really understand the concepts and the value that executive coaching can bring to an organization. However, I just do not feel qualified to do coaching at an executive level.”

I Am Curious

Have you ever received this type of question from folks in your organization?

It might not sound exactly the same, but the more I think about it the more prevalent I believe it is.

The basic root of the question is this:

“I am here and performed really well, and now I want to be there; how do I do it?”

Some examples I have heard recently from clients I work with might be helpful:

1. "I am in sales and have performed really well, what do I need to do to get promoted?”

2. "I am a high performing charge nursel, what do I need to do to become a supervisor?”

3. "I am a youth minister and performed really well, what do I need to do to get my own church?”

4. “I am a production manager and performed really well, what do I need to do to become a plant manager?”

As I am listening to my student, it occurs to me that my clients have been talking about some very similar types of issues. What does a leader do when someone is performing really well and they deserve other opportunities in the organization?

I have found over the years that telling someone to just “keep up the good work” and good things will happen is both lame on my end and not very helpful to them.

Before I give a suggestion on how to work with someone who presents to you in this manner, I think there are some important assumptions to put on the table:

• The person really has performed really well. If they have not, then they need to hear this from you and to get your thoughts on how they can improve performance.

• There is opportunity to move the person now or in the future. If there is a new opportunity for them, then it is up to you to get them there and set them up for success.

• The individual not only displays appropriate performance at the current role, but they have the necessary leadership ability to be successful at the next level. My preference here is that they have a perceived ability to perform two levels higher than their current level.

If all of these assumptions are true and the person is ready and deserving for new leadership opportunities, how will you help them focus on their development?

A Simple Suggestion

One thing that has helped me is to get them to focus on the idea of mastery in addition to performance.

Those who have a performance orientation tend to focus on that what is good enough to compete with others as the goal. In our society, performance is indicative of very short term thinking and the result can be either positive or negative. You are either better than others at what you do, which feels satisfying, or you are not, which feels discouraging.

Alternately, those with a mastery orientation take a longer term view of development. Learning, rather than competence, becomes the goal. Those with a mastery orientation focus on what is possible in their development. They think more about what they don’t know rather than showing others what they do know. A mastery development focus takes the person on a journey through their chosen field rather than to a destination of any particular organizational role.

Give It A Try

How can you help someone in your organization change the focus of their development from performance to mastery?

Notice I am not saying here to not focus on performance. Ensuring the person stays on task and accomplishes the goals is still important. Do not lose sight of  performance excellence.

The intention is to shift the thinking and the focus a bit from being competent to becoming an expert in their field.

What could they learn that they do not already know?

How could they innovate their current role?

Is there anything they could experiment with to try something a little different?

Having a mastery mindset often means asking an entirely different set of questions than those that are merely focused on performance.

If you give this a try with some folks on your team, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a comment below or send me an email. I am really interested in what this distinction looks like in your world.

How Do You Define Trust?: Delegation Series #4

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Delegation Series. To wrap up, I’ve invited my Executive Assistant, Brandi, to explain how building trust in our work has enabled me to delegate things to her. Here’s Brandi...

I have had the honor of working alongside Scott for over three years now. At the beginning of our working relationship, Scott delegated to me tasks of a traditional Virtual Assistant, such as calendar management, travel coordination, copy-editing, and social media management. Although I still have involvement in some of these areas, my role within Scott’s company has evolved quite a bit, allowing me to partner with him in new ways that develop and grow his business.

These days I spend the majority of my time overseeing the full administrative scope of Scott’s coaching and consulting practice: contracting, designing and distributing program materials, administering assessments, managing coaching engagements, invoicing, and much more. Additionally, I regularly have the opportunity to partner with Scott to help guide and manage special projects, external contractors, and various growth opportunities.

As Scott and I have developed our working relationship, one very key attribute has determined our success: trust.

Merriam-Webster defines trust as, “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.”

Scott and I define trust as:

• Full access to work directly with his clients, knowing that I will treat them with the utmost respect, kindness, and care, to ensure the success of the program, coaching engagement, or consultation.

• Confidence in my decision making, allowing me the freedom to select travel arrangements, schedule meetings, edit content, and make recommendations without questioning or hesitation.

• Reliance on each other’s areas of expertise. Recently, while talking through a project we were about to pull the trigger on, Scott said, “I am hesitating, even though I know this is the right direction, but I just can’t visualize it.” Within seconds I was able to virtually share my computer screen, walk him through a demonstration of a similar project, and give him the visuals he needed to ensure confidence in moving forward.

With trust as the foundation, Scott and I have found a rhythm that allows each of us to work within our strengths. As a result, not only are we both happy in our roles, but Scott’s business is thriving, his clients are happy, and he is free to spend his days doing what only he can do (even if it means leaving the office an hour early to play some golf or spend time with his sweet granddaughter, Natalie).

So, how do you develop this kind of trust with your team?

Here are a few things that have helped us:

• Prioritize regular communication. Scott and I meet first thing each Monday morning via video conference to catch up and talk about the week’s priorities.  

• Be reliable. Scott and I have proven to each other that we will do what we say we will do. If we encounter delays or roadblocks, we communicate our concerns quickly.

• Create an environment where it is safe to fail. In our very first meeting a few years ago Scott told me that on our team there is no blaming. When we fail, we are not interested in pointing fingers, we focus on making it right and learning so that the mistake is not repeated. I have heard Scott reiterate that to our team throughout the years and I believe this has significantly contributed to an environment of trust.

Trust is not something that develops overnight, but with the right person in the right place on your team, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish together as trust grows. If you are interested in exploring the idea of finding a new team member who can partner with you in similar ways, I encourage you to reach out to BELAY.

The Emotional Intelligence Paradox and the Top Books I Use When Coaching on Emotional Intelligence

What are the behaviors you see in leaders that cause you to say, “…now there is a lack of emotional intelligence”?

I have to be honest, over 80% of the time when my phone rings and someone wants to talk about my availability for executive coaching there is some element of emotional intelligence (EI) in the equation.  

Sounds of Diminished EI

Most of the experts in the emotional intelligence field say that the discipline starts with self-awareness. 

Self-Awareness is the conscious ability to know, think critically, and discern your character, motivations, desires, and emotions at all times. Now that is a tall order, but a discipline that is vital for us as leaders to master!  

My initial question to lead off the blog is premised around a “lack” of EI. In my experience, however, it isn’t that leaders are “train wrecks” when it comes to EI overall.  Far from it. For the most part, the leaders are bright, articulate, show good (if not great) executive presence, and can even be charming.  What I experience most often when going into an executive coaching opportunity is really just a strength overplayed.  In some cases, a strength overplayed on steroids.

I have really started to pay close attention to this “imbalance” of emotional intelligence and what it sounds like in organizations. Here are a few examples:

• The hyper-competitive VP whose desire to win overtakes their care and compassion for others. They don’t know when to stop competing. The passion for winning becomes a mean streak and they just want to punish others even after they have clearly won the day.
• The young leader who is so bent on high performance that they have no ability to attune to others concerns and hear where the “pitfalls” are. They have been rewarded for individual contribution their entire career and now find themselves in a leadership position, still feeling the huge need to do everything themselves.
• The pastor of a church whose congregation is dwindling and they blame it on the economy, the lack of programming, or the worship leader. They look at everyone else and everything else as the problem but fail to ask themselves how they are the issue.
• The perfectionist who throws a tantrum when things are not done exactly as they asked for it. They like power and success, but mostly they like control. There is a huge fear of failure that frames things not being exactly right as a collapse of the entire process rather than a learning of what doesn’t work.
• The leader who cares so much about valuing people and how others feel that they can not make a hard decision.  Empathy is often misrepresented as sympathy, so difficult decisions become impossible to make because others feelings might get hurt in the process.
• The IT leader who is so focused on process and guidelines that they can’t partner with others in the organization to even hear what their needs are. The default is always to a rule or a process or a guideline that takes precedence over understanding the user's needs.

Okay, so I think you get the idea. I could go on and on with these as I am sure by now you are either catching yourself in one of the above descriptions or just glad I didn’t type your particular “EI Imbalance” for all to read.

I think we all have these EI breaks from time to time, and becoming self-aware is the first step. Do you know this about yourself? Can you honestly accept your own feedback and recognize your need to change? It is a quite difficult aspect of leader development and frankly the reason most seek a coach to help them see what they can not.

My 7 Top Reads for Developing Emotional Intelligence.

I think one of the questions I get ask most often is framed around what people can read to get better at a certain aspect of emotional intelligence. So, here are my top picks using the Bar-On Model published by Multi-Health Systems as the framework. 

If you are wanting an overall increase in knowledge about emotional intelligence, my go to books are:

The EQ Edge & Primal Leadership. EQ Edge gives you an overview of a model for emotional intelligence and some practical development action steps. Primal Leadership is a classic in my opinion and emphasizes the importance of the mood and tone of the leader. Four styles are presented that are valuable in understanding how EI is expressed.

Self-Perception

This realm really is about how you see yourself from a confidence and life goals perspective. My two favorites here are Executive Presence by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner.

Self-Expression

This domain is about how one goes about communicating. I like Conversational Intelligence by Judith Glaser, which is about how to build trust and get results.  Another favorite here is a book of fiction by one of my favorite writers Fredrick Bachman. My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She Is Sorry is a great story of how a young girl learns to express herself. Even though the protagonist is only 8 years old, I think there are lessons of articulation for us all.

Interpersonal

This category is so broad so it really is really hard to pick. I think the two I recommend most often are Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Thompson and Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein. Boundaries because often people are searching for “the lines” in interpersonal relationships and Humble Inquiry because the problem is often one person’s pride that drags relationships into the tank.

Decision Making

Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud is a favorite for this domain. This book really emphasizes the appropriate assertiveness side of communication and when leaders need to make tough choices with processes or people.  Because so much of our decision-making is about controlling impulses, one of the more practical self-help resources I have found is Zoe McKey’s Unlimited Mind: Master Critical Thinking, Make Smarter Decisions, Control Your Impulses. 

Stress Management

My go-to resource here is The Stress Effect by Henry Thompson. This book gives a basic understanding of where stress comes from, how our bodies react to it and some really good practical suggestion on both management and elimination of stress.  The other classic in this arena is Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. Since the Bar-On model puts optimism in the stress management domain I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this one.

What Are Your Recommendations?

Please let me know if you pick one of these up and if you find it helpful or encouraging. I guess you can let me know if you hate it too, but I will probably still keep it on my list.  Also, if you have favorites that would be helpful, let me know. I am always looking for a good read and to update my list.

If you are interested in emotional intelligence and want to become certified in a valid and reliable instrument click here and you will be directed to my website for more information.