Work is not a transaction

In the world of business, it is now almost a given that developing relationship skills are fundamental to success and achievement.  Genuine collaborative relationships are proving more agile and effective at achieving good results than hierarchical ones.  However, much of the business world still operates as if employment was a transaction and not a mutual relationship.  Many folks also operate as if their associates, collaborators and customers are resources to be mined.  I believe that business is more than a transaction; in the modern economy, businesses do not just succeed on the back of their relationships, in many cases the business IS their relationships.  If we view others, whether they are employees, customers or associates, merely as transactional objects, it will be difficult to hold a picture of them as real human beings with needs, wants, feelings and viewpoints, and correspondingly to treat them as such.

Relationships are central to the work I do.  Uncovering and developing strong social connection underpins the methodology I apply with clients, with a key deliverable being closer working relationships, and I would be remiss if I didn’t attend to my own relationships to the best of my ability.  I know from my experience and my training that the quality of an outcome is directly related to the quality of relationship between the people attempting to create that outcome.  I would say that I am highly observant of how people relate to me and others and relationships occupy a lot of my thoughts, perhaps to the point of being hyper-sensitive to interactions between myself and others, as well as amongst other folks.  I’m an avid people watcher and I think that relationships make the world go round.

One of my core beliefs is that people are not resources to be mined: for information, for their custom, for advice, for leads and contacts, for anything.  Some of you may have worked out from comments on previous articles or Twitter that I love Radiohead.  Lead singer Thom Yorke released a solo album a few years ago and the opening line of the first track goes, “Please excuse me but I have to ask, are you only being nice because you want something?”  Ever felt that someone in your network or workplace was treating you like that?  Taking a cynical approach and asking politely when it suits you is not the same as cultivating and nurturing relationships over time.  Taking a consumerist approach and telling someone that you want to catch up only when you have need of them is not the same as valuing them.  Letting your staff know that they are doing a good job only when you want them to be receptive to you is not the same as caring about them.  Sending your “valued” customers an email with a special offer only when you need to drum up some new business is not the same as being attentive to them.  Everyone knows that you don’t get far these days without being kind or polite, however, kindness and politeness are not the only ingredients to good relationships.  People see through attempts to butter them up when the only time you are nice or make contact is when you want something.

Maintaining good relationships in our work requires some effort on our part.  Whoever we relate to in our work, whether that’s customers or colleagues, I suspect we make the most impact on them when we make a meaningful, personal emotional connection with them.  In order to do that, we need to deploy more than kindness.  We need to get to know a little about what makes them tick.  Empathy, or even more effective, role reversal, will help us to identify more deeply with others.  When we make the effort to place ourselves in the shoes of others, our worlds change forever and when we get a deep sense of another’s thoughts and feelings, we cannot help but relate to them in a gentler and more generous manner.

It is hard to reverse roles with someone if we don’t have some modicum of caring for them.  Why would we want to see things from another’s perspective unless we cared?  This also requires some effort.  Developing genuine caring for another is more than seeing them as someone who could be useful to us; it means we care for their success and well-being even when we don’t “need” them.  If we add people to our networks like some sort of people collectors, they will sense this.  The adage of “digging your well before you are thirsty” is not about storing people up like some kind of resource for the future; it is about growing mutually satisfying connections so that you are part of an active network that brings health and happiness to the whole.  More studies are showing that we thrive on caring for others; my belief is that this is more than liking someone’s comment on Facebook or following them on Twitter.  Caring is an active verb and if such studies are correct, it is good for everyone when we demonstrate care.

It is important to remember that authentic care, the kind that stimulates the “helper’s high” is a self-less care.  Stephen G. Post, PhD, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine says that “this profound state of joy and delight that comes from giving to others….doesn’t come from any dry action — where the act is out of duty in the narrowest sense, like writing a cheque for a good cause. It comes from working to cultivate a generous quality — from interacting with people.”  He’s talking about altruism.  I don’t think it’s crazy to think that we might do something self-less for a customer, a colleague or an associate once in a while.

What emerges over time when we actively show our care for others is trust.  Trust is one of the most valuable currencies in business.  Do our customers really trust us to deliver what we promise?  Do our work colleagues trust us to follow up on commitments and to back them, so that they can do their work well?  Do our associates trust us to share and collaborate generously?  I don’t think I’m going too far to say that it wouldn’t hurt us to go the extra mile for people only because they will feel good about it.   You can’t force trust, but authentic caring will necessarily nurture it.

While there is no “step 1, step 2″ failsafe method for growing good relationships at work, I’d say that kindness, role reversal, caring and trust are key ingredients.  There are also some guidelines I find useful to remain conscious of in my work.

Keep relationships current.  It can be hard to maintain business relationships these days.  It is easy to get busy and let them go by the wayside.  It is important to realise, however, that relationships are not an add-on to business; they are central to business.  Devoting time exclusively to nurturing relationships should be seen as part of the work we do, not something that we do only when we have the time.  You don’t get fitness credits; in other words, just because you exercised a lot in your twenties doesn’t mean that you can expect to be fit into your forties if you don’t maintain a fitness regime.  Similarly, you don’t get relationship credits.  True, someone may think well of you, however, we cannot ride on those favours we did or that really interesting conversation we had 4 years ago.  We need to continue to nurture relationships.  I’m advocating that we view relationships as more than simply “investments”; something we turn to on a rainy day.  I believe that relationships are worth nurturing purely as good things in themselves, and if, one day, there is some mutually beneficial business that comes out of them, all good.

Relationships should be mutual.  Like any personal relationship, a business relationship should be of benefit to both parties.  How quickly do we turn off people who always seem to take without giving?  How do we feel when people only call on us for help, but when we ask for theirs they are too busy or not interested?  If we are good at relationships, we think of others often; not only what they can help us with, but what we can offer them.

Rupture and repair.  Just like when you go on a first date, you get a first impression of a new colleague or associate and similarly, customers get an impression of you.  If your first impression of them is good, you get the tingles and you want another date.  If  their first impression of you is good, they will be happy to see you again.  Over time, we see things in others or others see things in us which are a little distasteful or we get let down or we sense that we have let them down.  The key thing to remember is that relationships are a function of time and that when there is a rupture, we can repair.  Customers want a response that communicates that you care they’ve had a bad experience with you and that you want them to have a better experience.  Associates and colleagues want to hear you say, “I think I stuffed up and I want to put it right,” and they want to see you follow through with some kind of repair.

I will close with a proverb that I have learnt over the years I’ve lived in New Zealand.  It is a traditional Maori proverb and it goes like this:

He aha te mea nui o te ao? 

He tangata! He tangata! He tangata!

What is the most important thing in the world? 
It is people! It is people! It is people!

Leaderless = Leaderfull

I’ve devoted a number of my posts to the topic of leader development.  In this post, I’d like to say more about what I mean by leader development because my thinking doesn’t come from a view that leaders are solely those at the top of organisations.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, when I talk about leaders and leadership, I’m not simply thinking about businesses that organise themselves around hierarchies, far from it.  The thing about leader development is that it is people development.  My belief is that the new age we are currently on the cusp of will be dominated less and less by hierarchies and more by relationships and collaboration and this calls us to develop ourselves accordingly.  This new construct is still forming, but many businesses are feeling the power that comes from interconnectedness; a kind of people power that hierarchical organisations would only dream of, if they could just let go of an Industrial Age paradigm about human groups.

In recent months, there has been a fair amount of analysis of the so-called “leaderless” movements of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements around the world.  The Occupy movements seem to be dissolving both in number and in our consciousness.  Much of what I have read seems to indicate that their breakups rest on the fact that they lacked coherent leadership and their failure to clearly articulate their demands.  In a lot of ways, there is some truth to this.  However, one thing I see in these movements is seeds of a new kind of community in which leaderless actually means leader-full.  We are just flexing our muscles.

I was pleased to attend a workshop by Etienne Wenger some years ago, in which he set out his thinking around Communities of Practice.  He defines Communities of Practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”  His model is applied in the area of social learning, however I would say his thinking is applicable much wider to include social and organisational change.  For Wenger, learning is central to human identity and he sees its primary focus as social participation.  His model shows that a CoP will have three elements that bind them together: domain, community and practice.  Domain is a shared area of interest, i.e. this is not just a loose network of people who like each other.  They have a common purpose, e.g. software developers or wine enthusiasts.  Community emerges from the active participation of every member of the CoP; sharing of information, offering help and building relationships.  There are no tourists in a CoP, there is active engagement.  The practice is the set of capabilities or skills the members enact that indicates they are fully fledged members of the CoP.  Over time, members develop a shared repertoire of tools, knowledge, language and strategies that indicate they not only have a common interest, but they actually do something in common, e.g. they take turns to hold wine tastings or they work together on developing new iPhone apps.

How is this related to leadership?

Our current understanding of what leadership means is still largely drawn from conventions of how organisations have been structured in our recent history.  This makes sense; if we have some ways of behaving that are driven by our beliefs, until our beliefs shift, our behaviours will pretty much remain static.  Organisations are only just coming to glimpse the kind of structures that are much more fit for purpose, Communities of Practice being just one.  We have a very long inheritance of organisational structure from our industrial and military past and for a long period in our history, this suited the needs of an industrial society.  Organising human endeavour with a leader at the top and a rigid hierarchy below has meant that we tend to think of leaders only as those with leadership title or those at the so-called “top”.  Leaders make decisions, leaders are accountable, leaders lead while others follow.  This structure naturally lends itself to a command and control way of thinking and behaving and in the days of the early industrial revolution, this suited the needs of businesses.  The tasks involved in driving a successful business were best organised with the head telling the rest of the body what to do and how to do it.  We didn’t need huge amounts of creativity and autonomy to reside in the lower structures; all they needed to do was what they were told because the higher-ups had the end goals in their sights.  Similarly, militaries need that command and control structure in order to carry out their role effectively.  We couldn’t have foot soldiers deciding how they wanted to go about their job, otherwise we wouldn’t have the kind of strength and order a fighting force needs; it needs to be single-minded, not multi-minded.  So, in essence, form followed function.

Even in the early days of Christianity, orthodoxy took hold and dispensed with the more liberal, personal forms of spirituality.  For example, Gnosticism, a movement based on personal religious experience and transcendence arrived at by internal, intuitive means, was vilified as blasphemous and dangerous, and the Church, with the Pope as its head, became the final arbiter for all matters moral, social and spiritual.  With the leader in place, there was no need for individuals to ponder about their morality; as long as they did what the priest/bishop/Pope told them to do, they would have happy and ordered lives, with the added bonus of a similarly joyous afterlife.  No need to question, no need to work it out for yourself.  The Protestant Reformation injected a new brand of thinking into the mix, with believers thinking that they could perhaps have a direct line to God, rather than through the mediator-priest.  Even so, the predominant social structures in place at the time meant that eventually, most Protestant churches eventually defaulted to some form of leadership hierarchy, and those that didn’t were considered fringe movements.

In the same manner of form following function, industrial/military societies have organised their education systems to provide adequate preparedness to enter a largely hierarchical workforce.  No real need to teach critical thinking skills, no real need to provide opportunities for meaningful personal growth, as long as you could read, write and add up.  Of course, I’m generalising, but on the whole, industrial/military societies provided, and to a shockingly great extent, still provide sausage factory schooling.  Because these three influences (the industrial, the military and the social/spiritual) were so pervasive, it makes complete sense that they were so instrumental in setting up a worldview that still largely holds sway today.

The world is rapidly changing however.

In a recent TEDx talk, former UK Liberal Democrat Party leader Paddy Ashdown sets out some interesting, if not particularly new, ideas about a new world power structure emerging.  While his talk focusses more on global governance and international power shifts, some of the points he makes are salient and relevant to all kinds of leadership and organisation.  If we consider that leadership and power are inextricably linked, we can look to the Occupy movements as some indication of where we might be headed.  Power, in the sense of potency to act, is becoming more diffuse, whether governments like it or not.  In response there will naturally be reaction, but I believe the tide is surely turning.  While the Occupy movements may not have catalysed immediate changes to global financial or economic systems, I believe they signal a new kind of active involvement in society and growing desire for power to be spread more widely.

Ashdown suggests that we are coming back to an age where global governance is carried out via treaties.  He quotes Lord Palmerston saying, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”  This is ringing true in the world of business.  The BizDojo in Auckland, New Zealand is but one example of professional people coming together in a pragmatic way to share expertise, collaborate on one-off projects and create a fresh new business community.  These knowledge workers know that rigid vertical hierarchies are not the best way to organise themselves.  The strength comes from the power of their networks.  To quote Ashdown again, “In the modern age where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.”

So what does this have to do with leadership then?

Remember I said that our traditional notions of leadership have come from the hierarchical ways we have organised ourselves.  If our power structures are shifting, so will leadership.  While the Occupy movements have been called leaderless by most commentators in the media, I’m not so sure.  Leaderless if we look at the movements through old lenses, true; there was nobody at the “top” because there was no top.  I think this new social construct will call upon us to shift our ideas as to what a leader is.  In a previous blog, I suggested, for example, that a customer service employee who connects with a dissatisfied customer, preventing them from going to your competitor, is exercising just as much leadership as the person with CEO on their door.  Leader development is people development and people development is leader development.

Power is certainly spreading out to the people.  With more diffuse power, we will all be called upon to exercise leadership.  Strong and effective Communities of Practice consist of people with a wide repertoire of personal characteristics and capabilities that in the old days, might have sat with a privileged few.  Everyone exercises some form of leadership, however the new paradigm of leadership is not about managing hierarchies, but about influencing, collaborating and relating.

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and The Spider, paints a potent picture of decentralised organisations.  Decentralised systems, they say, “have no clear leader, no hierarchy and no headquarters.   If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over others.”  However, I contend, they do exercise influence.  This points to a key leadership capability that we all require more of as the old makes way for the new.  People at work will not only require some kind of  professional skill set or technical expertise, but they will also need a well developed set of personal capabilities, those which we term “emotional intelligence”.  This is not limited to freelancers or small business owners, but to anyone working in the Knowledge Economy.  I believe that many businesses will see the benefits of reorganising with a more diffuse power base that unlocks the leadership and creativity of more of those who work within them.

In this article in December’s Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel poses the question, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve high levels of coordination without without a supervisory superstructure?”  I think he’s on to something.  With highly developed leader capabilities all over organisations, leadership (the practice) will emerge from the interactions and relationships between leaders (the people).  Again, I’m intending leaders to be those with authority and accountability.  It then behoves organisations and individuals to devote themselves to sound capability development of the kind I hinted at earlier.  These would include developing greater empathy, greater abilities to listen, greater abilities to collaborate, greater abilities to problem-solve with others, greater abilities to self-manage and, of course, greater self-awareness.  As Paddy Ashdown says, the most important bit about the structure then becomes your docking points-your connections with others; not your hierarchy.

Finally, I think it’s important to recap a point I have made in previous articles, that is, that a new paradigm of organisations will not simply do away with the old.  The new construct will include and transcend the current one, so we will still find that some organisations work best with a hierarchical structure or a command-and-control style of leadership.  However, they will be best applied when they fit the purpose of the organisation.  I suspect, for example, that local emergency management structures will require a command-and-control style of leadership in crisis situations.  I, for one, would prefer that a highly efficient response team deals with a natural disaster or fire to one that organises itself on the basis of peer consultation.

I have set out just a few of my thoughts and reflections in this article and, as always, am keen to read what you can add and build onto what I have written.  I’m no expert, and I suspect there isn’t one anyway.  We are in immersed in the unknown right now and the New Normal will come about from all of our contributions.

Manage from strength, not deficit

Carbon is intensely heated and pressurised beneath the surface of the Earth to create a diamond; essentially it’s a lump of coal that has been pressure cooked for thousands of years.  Dust, smoke and ash scatter evening sunlight and we see a stunning red sunset; so it’s basically air pollution.  An oyster takes a piece of microscopic grit and forms a pearl; it’s really an irritant that the oyster is trying to protect itself from.

Far be it from me to shatter the romantic associations we place on sunsets, pearls and diamonds, but they do, in fact, originate from stuff which we would not normally consider to be lovely or desirable.  Every magnificent and serene wonder in the universe arose out of the chaos and turbulence of the Big Bang, hardly a peaceful nor benign process.  In the realm of human learning, our most prized gems often arise out of the midst of our most difficult or challenging circumstances.  It’s not a cliche for nothing: “What doesn’t kill me will make me grow stronger.”  At the same time, if we are bereft of personal resources, whether that be internal strengths, strong relational connections with others or a satisfying connection to something ‘higher’, we will find learning and change more threatening than life-giving.  It is worth bearing these two points in mind if you manage staff performance: 1) the seed of excellence lies in the heart of inadequate performance; and 2) we cannot drive people to higher performance if they are not aware of what they are already doing well.  We do not learn something new out of nothing.

An old supervisor of mine used to use the phrase ‘grist for the mill’ when I would talk about some undesirable behaviour in a client.  His reframe of a behaviour or attitude has stood me in good stead for many years.  Not only am I trained in a strengths-based methodology, but my outlook on human beings is one that says we are inherently good and that our behaviours are aimed at generating positive outcomes.  That said, best intentions do not always result in the best outcomes for everyone concerned, but this is more likely down to human clumsiness, shortsightedness and fallibility than willful nastiness, laziness or under-handedness.  The less-than-functional is merely grist for the developmental mill; raw material out of which the treasure can emerge.

Thankfully, for more and more people, it seems entirely sensible that we look at workplace performance through a strengths-based lens.  Why performance manage someone purely from a deficit paradigm, i.e. what is not going well?  While we do have to address poor performance, there is a paradigm out of which we can learn to operate which is progressive, esteem-enhancing and effective.

Just as counter-productive as the deficit paradigm is the head-in-the-sand paradigm.  Many who operate out of this world-view would say that they are optimistic and positive.  What this mindset propounds is that you don’t look at the dysfunctional; accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  While I’m all for emphasising the positive, if we behave like Pollyanna, we miss the whole picture.  Taken to an extreme, there are managers who are overly optimistic, believing that, in the end, it’ll all be alright.  Being overly positive can lead you to ignore evidence of some ‘grit’ in your system.  The head-in-the-sand paradigm says that if you just accentuate the positive, the problems and difficulties will work themselves out.  Wrong.  ”Things” do not “work themselves out“.  I know there are CEOs and other leaders out there who hold a version of this viewpoint.  They believe themselves to be positive and optimistic and I’ve no doubt whatsoever that they lead blessed and joyful lives.  However, I’ve heard a self-professed optimist say ”Why would I want to put any of my energy into the staff who are causing the most problems?  I prefer to spend my time on staff who are really performing.”  From here, you are one step away from:  ”Why would I want to spend any time or effort on developing the poor performers?”  ”Why wouldn’t I get rid of the difficult ones and hire people who are willing to just fit in; there are plenty of people who would be so grateful to work here.”  This, to my mind, is not being positive.  It is an over-developed desire to see the positives to the extent that you fail to see the whole picture.  If you put your head in the sand, you are not only blind to weaknesses, but you are blind to the developmental opportunities and the potential pearls amongst your staff.

So both the deficit paradigm and the head-in-the-sand paradigm are limited: they only look at part of someone’s performance.  To view the world from a strengths-based perspective, we look at the whole: what is working well and what is not working well.  A strengths-based paradigm is also a systems thinking paradigm.  It is one that sees the wholeness and connectedness of people.  We are not machines with a bunch of moving parts that can be taken out and replaced when they fail; we are complex systems in which the whole is far greater than the sum of our individual cells.  So in a performance conversation with staff, we need to view their failings in light of their whole being.  There are some things they do well, there are other things that they don’t excel at, but they are inseparable.  Like finding the diamond in the rough, the potential lies hidden.

Even though we know how good it feels to focus on what we do well, drawing attention to others’ weaknesses in workplace performance is not a habit easily unlearnt.  Through our early years, many of us have learnt to place too much value judgement on ourselves and to classify many things about us as inherently good and worthwhile or inherently bad and undesirable.  However, learning to see the world through a strengths-based lens has some bottom line benefits.  A 2002 survey by the Corporate Leadership Council questioned nearly 20,000 employees in 29 countries and found that when their managers emphasised strengths, this resulted in a  36% improvement in performance as opposed to a 27% decline in performance when the emphasis was on weaknesses.

Taking a strengths-based systems view to human performance includes developing a person’s ability to self-reflect so they aware of themselves, what they do well and what needs improvement.  Asking a person to reflect on themselves is the starting point for any conversation about performance.  Making a performance analysis by using a simple, yet powerful three-fold progression of questions means that the person expands their view of themselves and is more capable of being autonomous, confident and engaged at work.  Firstly, ask someone to recall what they do well.  Once they have done this, let them know what you observe in them that is excellent.  Secondly, ask them to reflect on what they do too much of.  Remember I said earlier that I believe all human behaviour is aimed at creating a positive outcome.  Sometimes, there is something that we are good at that we apply too much, and this can get in the way of ideal performance.  It is not intrinsically bad, yet in great quantity is counter-productive.  Salt is a good thing to add to soup but too much will ruin the flavour.  Again, let the other person know what you see them do too much or too often.  Finally, turn the focus to what the person does too little of.  Once they have done this, add more information from your perspective.  Keeping this simple and structured will provide the person with a full and manageable picture of themselves.  Out of this analysis you will have a distillation of information that shows the way to a development path.

To my mind, in a strengths-based worldview, a performance conversation is not one-sided.  Unless a staff member is going through some sort of formal disciplinary process, it seems to me that conversations about performance are just that: conversations.  Both parties contribute.  Both parties have rights and responsibilities.  Both parties have the right to be heard, to be respected and to be believed.  Staff are responsible for being fully present in these conversations and participating.  Staff are also responsible for developing an open attitude to learning and change.  It is no good becoming defensive in the face of uncomfortable feedback or leaving the manager to make all the analysis.  A staff member who is not able to reflect on their performance is the staff member begging to be micro-managed and I know of no employee nor manager who truly desires that.  A manager is responsible for developing the habit of noticing performance, both good and bad-all the time.  It is most useful when both staff and manager are clear about performance standards and achievement throughout the year, not simply at annual performance review time.  Keep good performance on track by giving real-time feedback.   I have spoken to too many people who are in the dark about their performance because their manager just saves everything for that once a year appointment, if at all.  Furthermore, performance conversations should not be scripted or determined solely by the performance review document.  It should be a human to human encounter in which both parties are able to contribute.

Finally, do something after performance conversations.  If you are a manager who has regular conversations with staff, you are likely to follow up anyway, but particularly after one about work performance, make sure something happens, whether that is a coaching session, a decision to undertake training, another review or whatever seems appropriate.  This bit is really important.  What arises from performance conversations is that grist for the developmental mill; within the heart of poor performance lie the seeds of excellence.  Knowing that you have a culture of performance, where it’s just something that gets talked about regularly, means that people can reasonably expect there to be a professional development path that continues to unfold.  Ideally, this will be specific to each person, since each person’s needs will vary.  Whatever you do, though, make sure that you do discuss what is not going well and that you do something to ameliorate it.  It’s a paradox of strengths-based performance management:  you want to change the poor performance but you must start by looking at the good, and when you eventually identify the inadequate, you have the raw material for greater excellence.  If we don’t acknowledge what is outstanding, we don’t have the stable platform from which to grow and develop; and if we don’t examine what is poor, we just end up with a touchy feely nicey nice culture where we stagnate.  We need to find the grit in order to learn something new.  What is the irritant?  What is the source of dissatisfaction?  What is getting in the way of excellence?

The pricelessness of reflection

W. Edwards Deming is quoted as saying, “Experience by itself teaches nothing.”  In a fast-paced world where we are bombarded with more and more stimuli and we are called upon to carry out multiple tasks, this is truer now than ever before.  Our lives are filled with more and varied experiences which, by themselves, leave us with nothing more than information.  Sometimes we get to the end of our very busy days and the most we have made of it was, “I was run off my feet all day,” and we let go the opportunity to reflect on what it all meant to us and our lives.  Are we doing what makes us happy?  Are we spending our lives doing something meaningful to us?  Are our lives enriched by the myriad of interactions and relationships we hold?  Are we making a difference?  If we were asked, we could probably recall the things that happen to us daily, but it is not sufficient to merely recollect if these experiences are to have enormous value to us.  In our working lives, which are becoming more unpredictable and and revolve less around the carrying out of rote routine tasks, we are exposed to a veritable banquet of new experiences and interactions.  Within these experiences lie the building blocks of our transformation.

To build on a previous article, while we certainly need to be open to new information and experiences, we need to do something purposeful with them.  Often in my work, I have cause to reflect on the value of reflection.  Just as every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, so do life’s little episodes.  There is a beginning phase, called the ‘warm up’, the middle phase, where the action occurs, and then there is the last phase, in which meaning is made of the experiences in the action phase.  This last phase is where the reflection happens.  Reflection is essential in order for the significance of the action to be realised.  All too often, we get to the end of the action phase and we hurriedly move on to the next thing.  It’s all do, do, do.

I often liken it to digesting.  If it weren’t for our digestive system, we would find ourselves either unable to take in any more food or passing food straight through our bodies without the benefit of extracting the nutrients that we need to build and grow.  A banquet table filled with food has no significance to us until we take the food into our bodies and let our enzymes go to work.  Only when this has occurred and our cells are making use of the nutrients is the food of any real use to us.  Experience is much the same; only when we have digested it and made conscious meaning of it does it provide us with sustenance and the building blocks for growth.

One of the most skilled experiential trainers I have ever had the privilege to work with, John Bergman, once said, “I provide people with experiences.  I know they’ve had one because I can watch them having it.  What I don’t know is what they’ve learnt from it.  The reflection afterwards is the most important bit.”  Thankfully, I read more people writing about the importance of transfer of learning in the workplace.  Whether you are running a training course, carrying out some one-to-one coaching, facilitating a business simulation with a bunch of senior execs or teaching people to apply social media in their work, it behoves you to facilitate and guide some reflection on what you have been asking people to learn.  Real learning is integrated into who we are as people.  Otherwise, it’s not learnt.  Unless we digest and make meaning of something new, it will pass right through us.  It’s not an added extra; it’s an integral part of the learning process.

In setting up a learning programme with a new client, I have sometimes been asked, “What will the ‘take home’ be?”  If I’m honest, I would say, “I don’t know.”  I could tell you what my agenda will be.  I could tell you what exercises I will get people to do.  I could tell you what I’d like people to learn.  I could tell you that I have a great experiential process that will show sales staff the way to providing better customer experiences.  However, I think we are well past the time when we can assume that just because someone has sat in a training room that they will have learnt what the trainer or their boss or the HR Manager wants them to learn.  Certainly, businesses require people to learn things that will assist them to excel at their jobs and, certainly, businesses want this elusive thing called ROI and certainly, businesses want to spend their L&D budgets on something purposeful that will provide benefits to the people and the business.  That said, spending L&D money is no guarantee of learning or development unless the learning programme (whether that’s a series of coaching sessions or an e-learning programme or leadership development programme) has reflection and integration built in to the programme.  So what’s the take home?  That can depend entirely on how much reflection and integration I ask of people in the session.  If there is none, I’m leaving the ‘take home’ to chance; perhaps some of the people are already good at reflecting and meaning-making, perhaps some of them are not.

Developing the role of Astute Reflector, however, is not only applicable in the context of formal learning; far from it.  More of what we need to absorb and integrate comes from our daily experiences and interactions at work than from ‘formal’ learning situations.  Bringing the learning into work is more than a zeitgeist catch-phrase; it’s about how you view everything that you do, everything that happens to you, every conversation you have.  Is your working day just a series of things to ‘get through’ or are you making the most of your daily experiences, pleasant and not so pleasant, as learning fodder?  Do you get to the end of a busy week with a sense of indigestion because you haven’t processed and made meaning of the week’s events?  We need to shift our thinking so we see that everything that goes on at work is about learning.  There are some compelling benefits that can come to us from developing the role of Astute Reflector in our lives.

We become better at learning from mistakes.  When our Astute Reflector role is well-developed, we regularly stop and debrief, either by ourselves or with others, to examine what went well and what didn’t go so well.  Once we have made this conscious, the chances of us repeating our mistakes begin to fall dramatically.

We distill the ingredients for success.  Rather than leaving good performance to chance, becoming conscious of what works well also shows us the way to consistent excellence.  This isn’t about finding the one or two things that work well and sticking to them, for ongoing reflection is the thing.  However, we can improve our chances of future success if we have actually stopped to reflect.

We see patterns that were previously hidden.  When we reflect, we connect the dots with other experiences in our lives.  This begins to show up patterns.  If you are a systems thinker, you will hold that everything is connected to everything else.  Reflection illuminates those connections, from where we become more conscious of values, habits and attitudes which serve us well and those which don’t.

In his excellent article on mastering the art of self-reflection, Adam Chalker lists three kinds of reflection: reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action and critical self-reflection.  I believe that all three of these are indispensable abilities of the role of Astute Reflector.

If we inculcate the practice of reflection-on-action, we habituate ourselves to asking questions such as:

• What was I trying to achieve?
• What did my actions and responses create: in myself, in others, in the wider system?
• What did I do well? What did I do too much of (that got in the way of excellence)?  What did I do too little of?
• What does that remind me of (from the past)?

Growing the ability to reflect-in-action means that we become more able to notice ourselves while we are doing something and, if necessary, shift our attitudes or actions.  It’s a bit like reading a map while we are on a journey, checking to see if we are heading where we want to go.  If we wish to develop this habit, we can ask ourselves:

• What am I actually doing right now?
• How are people responding to me?
• How am I feeling right now?
• Am I heading in the right direction?  If not, what change of course is required?

I’ve written before on the need to develop more critical self-reflection and self-awareness.  This is taking a cold, hard look at ourselves and asking the challenging questions:

• What lies do I tell myself?
• What am I pretending not to see about myself?
• Am I doing something which truly brings meaning and joy to my life?
• How do I enact power?  Is it personal potency or power over others?
• Do I like who I am?

Once again, these are not discretionary matters to consider only if we have the luxury of time; the role of Astute Reflector is core to the world of work today.  Charles Darwin knew about the value of learning when he said, “It’s not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.”  Making it a habit to ask, “So what?” expands our awareness, helps us to fine tune our abilities and increases our sense of potency in the world.  Best of all, it costs nothing to grow the role of Astute Reflector and maximise your day-to-day experiences.  Cost of training programme that teaches you nothing new: $2000.  Becoming more reflective and conscious: priceless.

 

 

 

Stop training and start developing

I admire people who are good with words.  A wordsmith such as Neil Hannon, one of my favourite song writers, deploys words to great effect whether he is making a biting commentary on the financial game-players who were instrumental in causing the 2008 Great Recession, telling a story of a lonely woman of advancing years or sharing his optimism about life with his baby daughter.  In their younger years, highly articulate and eloquent people such as Hannon learnt exactly the same letters of the alphabet that I learnt, and over their lifetimes have learnt how to do something quite special with them.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet.  Once you’ve learnt those 26 letters, you can’t learn any more.  People who are good at expressing themselves through language have developed their capabilities to use it in highly creative, skillful ways.  In order to become one of these folks, you don’t need to learn more letters of the alphabet; you learn other things to do this.  You don’t see aspiring writers attending courses in order to learn more letters; you see them attending creative writing courses that put them in touch with their human creativity, associating with other writers and applying their innate creativity to the use of a finite set of grammatical and syntactical rules and conventions (while also sometimes challenging or bending these rules in spontaneous ways).

Developing people in the workplace is a little similar.  Entry level managers, for example, will need to learn the basic tools of management in order to provide competent supervision of their teams and tasks, however good leadership comes about when this manager applies themselves to growing their personal capabilities so that they can apply management knowledge in inspiring and motivating ways with greater vision, impact and influence.

For many of you in a leadership position, you probably don’t need more top tips or knowledge about your job.  You probably don’t need much more information about ‘stuff’; you would probably enjoy developing something else, something deeper that frees you up to apply the knowledge and information you have already acquired with greater ease and finesse.  It’s one thing to know about emotional intelligence, for example.  It’s quite another thing for you to apply this elegantly in a living, breathing workplace with real life people in real life situations.

I say all this by way of stating one of my wishes for 2012: that more organisations wake up to the idea that, rather than sending people on more training courses that treat them like receptacles for yet more tools, tricks and tips, they should be investing in developing the users of these tools.  Rather than trying to fill people up with more information and knowledge, they could look for opportunities for them to learn how to apply what they already know in spades, with greater fluency, creativity and responsiveness to the real needs of their organisations and its stakeholders.  I wish that rather than send someone to another seminar about emotional intelligence, that they invest in some kind of learning that allows them to become more aware of themselves, to reflect and to actually rehearse better emotional and people skills.  I wish that rather than sending a salesperson on another sales training that tells them yet again how important it is to listen to clients and customers, that they invest in something where these salespeople can develop the “role” of Effective Listener by practicing and reflecting on their abilities to listen well to people.  I wish that rather than send customer service staff away to learn lists of things to do when dealing with customers, that they are provided with flexible learning processes that allow them to grow the whole range of human attitudes and behaviours required in order to provide the ultimate customer experience.  I wish that rather than send that shy or reticent manager on another course to learn about “difficult conversations” with their staff, that they seek out the opportunities for this manager to develop the “role” of Robust Guide and actually get to the bottom of why he doesn’t do it (even though he knows what he is supposed to be doing) and to break through those inhibitors by rehearsing and refining some new behaviours and attitudes.

All of this is possible, it is not pie in the sky.  I see such things happen before my eyes.  This is my call for greater emphasis on “role development” and less emphasis on “training” in workplace learning and development.  The word “role” is already known to you.  However, in my work, I apply a very particular meaning of it with reference to capability development.  In the work I do, a role is defined as the living expression of a person in any moment they are alive.  A role is a holistic concept and consists of three components: thinking, feeling and behaving.  Far too much in the way of workplace training with behaviour change as its end result does not address the whole person.  We are whole people and to leave out any of these three components will not necessarily make for genuine and long-lasting shifts in behaviour.

We all amass a vast repertoire of roles in our lifetimes and they arise in response to another person or situation.  Many of the roles we enact in our daily lives are ones which we have become quite habituated to enacting.  In many cases, these habituated role responses are pretty adequate, but in a number of cases, particularly when the environment is more unpredictable and changeable, we go into a role which does not quite fit the bill.  In many of these cases, more information or knowledge will not make a difference to our abilities to respond more adequately; developing our role repertoire, however, will.

To illustrate, complete this sentence: think of  X (a person in your workplace, or maybe even yourself) who sometimes struggles with Y (a task or duty at work).  X has all the information and knowledge they require in order to Y, but something still gets in the way.  When thinking of what X needs to learn, it is helpful to not reduce this simply to “They need to learn how to Y better.”  That assessment is too mechanistic and stops well short of the real learning need.  Such a simplistic assessment can lead to the wrong prescription.

There will be “roles”, or personal capabilities, that unlock their ability to Y.  I have spoken to too many salespeople who keep getting sent on the same old, same old sales courses year after year in order to help them boost their sales figures, and year after year, there is no significant shift in their performance.  In many cases, what gets in the way of optimum performance is not the lack of sales knowledge; it is under-developed listening abilities or an under-developed ability to put themselves in the shoes of their clients or under-developed confidence or under-developed something-else.  I have spoken with too many managers who get sent on courses to learn about having “difficult” conversations with their staff, but, again, in most of these cases, these courses do not create a shift in behaviour because they already know what they should be doing; what they could do more of is confidence or the ability to set boundaries or even the ability to be calm and centred.  Telling someone to be calm and centred will not necessarily make it happen.

A lot of this waste in the L&D budget comes about because what is seen is the failure to perform the task at hand effectively.  This, however, is merely the symptom of something deeper that needs addressed.  We can only really see behaviours and we really only measure performance that is measurable.  What do you do when the thing that needs developing is not so easy to see or measure?  The important thing is to make a really thorough assessment of the learning need.  It is also important to engage with a process that will allow people to learn holistically, so that the shifts in visible behaviour are real, deep and long-lasting and are related to shifts in the person as a person.

Making better decisions about the L&D budget has other ripple effects.  Even in the midst of economic turmoil, I still read about skills shortages in some industries and organisations.  Despite high unemployment, some businesses still say they can’t get the right people.  If we look at who is already in the business and make better assessments of what they really need to learn in order to boost their performance, we can go some way to improving staff engagement as well as the bottom line.  Taking a “role development” perspective on L&D can assist businesses to attract and retain the people they need.  Investing in developing people as people, not as resources that do things, shifts the culture and unlocks opportunity, creativity and innovation.

What’s your wish for 2012?

What the world needs now….

…is love sweet love.  As Burt Bacharach and Hal David said, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.  At the risk of sounding a bit ‘soft’ as the holiday season approaches, I have been reflecting on some recent conversations along with some experiences I’ve had through 2011 and wish to emphasise the importance of developing what are often called ‘people skills’ in our businesses and organisations.  As Dr. John McGurk states in this rather excellent November 2010 study, “Using the Head and Heart at Work,” people skills are rarely neutral, that is, they have the power to influence in positive, as well as negative, ways.  I don’t believe I need to make the case for superlative ‘head’ or ‘hand’ skills at work; those cases have long been won.  Instead, I will bang on yet again about the need to hone our ‘heart’ skills.  It is by deployment of our ‘heart’ skills that we facilitate more effective application of our ‘head’ and ‘hand’ skills at work.  Now that our workplaces are becoming more and more relationship- and collaboration-based, the urgent need to develop greater ‘heart’ at work is before us.

I know most of you will probably feel that you have plenty of love and caring in your personal lives.  However, we spend a huge chunk of our waking hours at work, usually with people that we haven’t chosen.  We also have opened our eyes to the fact that we actually want our businesses and organisations to be places where we feel valued and appreciated, where we feel we are making a difference to others, where we can be human.  It is a nonsense to hold on to an Industrial Age notion that we should leave our whole selves at the door when we enter our workplaces and simply offer up our brains or hands to be deployed as some manager’s resource.  We want to care and we want people to care about us.

There is growing evidence that doing good for others and showing caring for others is also good for us.  Two large studies have shown that older adults who volunteer live longer than non-volunteers.  Indeed, altruistic emotions seem to override the effects of cortisol, our stress hormone.  A recent study has also shown that helping and caring for others increases levels of oxytocin, the bonding hormone that helps us develop trusting relationships.  If we have reduced cortisol and increased oxytocin when we are compassionate and caring towards others, if we feel good because of the unselfish good we do, it boggles the mind why we still endure workplaces that cause us to feel bad or where our good deeds go unnoticed.  However, as William Glasser is noted as saying, we cannot change others; we can only change ourselves; if we change ourselves, others cannot help but respond to us differently.

If you believe that we get back what we give out, why not be mindful of opportunities to care for others with whom we work?  One note about this do-good effect, though.  Those studies which show improved well-being when we are compassionate towards others also indicate that this comes out of unselfish good deeds, not ‘dry’ acts of duty for others.  Just as your boss won’t guarantee higher levels of engagement by faking care, consultation or listening, we can’t fake generosity.  It requires genuineness and authenticity on our part; not simply clicking “Like” on Facebook.

For those of you who watched the video clip on empathy by Professor Simon Baron Cohen in my previous blog article, you will have heard about the monkeys who help other monkeys in distress.   A bunch of rhesus monkeys were taught to obtain food by pulling on a chain.  When a monkey was shown another monkey receiving an electric shock every time the chain was pulled, they stopped pulling the chain.  One monkey in this experiment went without food for 12 days.  That monkey in particular would put some bosses I know to shame.  Empathy at work is not discretionary, as it may have been for Victorian mill owners.  If leaders want engagement, it requires something more than an annual Christmas bonus or staff party.  It’s not just down to the bosses though.  We all have a part to play in making our workplaces more human, too.  We get back what we give.

So with this mounting evidence of how good it is for us to do good, let’s not play the “you go first” game.  I suspect that care, concern and compassion for others at work is a self-reinforcing cycle.  We do good, we feel good, we are motivated to continue doing good; and others feel good when we care for them, they begin to care for us more.  I know that the opposite can certainly become a negative spiral as well.  Make the first move.

Keep going on your path of self-awareness.  Our interpersonal abilities spring out of and are inextricably linked with our intrapersonal abilities.  In other words, the greater our self-knowledge and ability to identify, name and process our own emotional life, the greater our capability to recognise and respond to the emotional life of others.  We can go on and on learning about ourselves.  A massage therapist will learn the technique of palpation: feeling the body’s tissues for areas of tightness.  With greater practice and experience, the therapist will develop greater acuity to feel smaller and smaller areas of tension that a beginner will not notice.  We can similarly grow greater acuity to notice our own feelings, many of which we are unconscious to in our daily lives.  As we acquaint ourselves with ourselves, our eyes also open to the smallest facial expressions, the subtlest body language and most obscure meanings in the words and acts of others.  Tuning into ourselves helps us tune into others, thereby increasing our ability to care.  Focus on your body right now: what is it telling you?

Notice others.  Finely tune your awareness of what is going on for other people.  Many of us like to pride ourselves on our abilities to work hard and get things done and we overlook the impact of our stresses and challenges.  Too many people ‘suffer in silence’ at work and in some cases, people even leave organisations because they get burnt out.  Some take the approach that if they couldn’t stand the heat, it was best they went, but most of the cases I know of are where highly competent, engaged and dedicated people left because they felt isolated and couldn’t sustain themselves any longer.  It is these folks we need to watch out for.  If we fine tune our awareness of others and do simple things to let them know they are appreciated, it will make an enormous difference to them.  When people talk about how overworked they feel or how stressed they are by a deadline or a heavy workload, we don’t have to step it to try to fix it for them, but listening to them and letting them know they have a trusted person to offload can let them know they are not alone and they have support.  Think about your co-workers: who needs some support right now?

Listen to others.  We are busy, this is true.  We often hear others, but much of what they say goes in one ear and out the other and in many cases, we don’t even look at the person talking to us.  If we take the time to really listen to others, we have the  power to make a difference to them.  Ask anyone who volunteers on a telephone helpline.  Listen to their words and listen ‘between the words’.  Good listening comes from being present to what the person says as well as how they say it.  It involves noticing what they don’t say and how they do this as well.  It primarily involves turning off our inner monologue so that we do more than simply wait our turn to open our mouths.  Think about a recent conversation you had: how much did you really listen?  What might you have missed?

Develop the habit of gratitude.  I was reminded of the power of gratitude by a close friend of mine recently.  It caused me to bring to mind the people for whom I am grateful in my life; both for being a part of my life, as well as for the kind acts they show me.  Imagine what that did to my physiology, my heart and my mind.  I can tell you that his suggestion to focus on gratitude certainly intruded on the grumpiness I was sitting with at the time.  As with altruism, developing an attitude of gratitude has been shown to increase our own well-being, reduce our stress and anxiety levels and encourage kinder behaviour towards others.  I have heard of one business which has recently started the practice at their team meetings of each person thanking one other person in the team for something they did through the week.  It has made it an even nicer place to work; everything we know about engagement points to a friendly culture being an essential ingredient.  If there is a boss who wants to argue that caring for others at work is pointless, I will give them this Manager’s contact details.  Think about your workplace: who or what are you grateful for?

All this stuff may sound a little ‘touchy-feely’, however, more of us are coming to acknowledge the power of these small differences that make big differences in people’s working lives.  From a bottom line perspective, more is also known about the power of engagement.  Engagement comes about because managers, leaders and others within organisations develop our capabilities to be human with other humans.  People engage when they know that who they are as a person is noticed, supported and encouraged; when they know they are not a cog in a machine.

Two final thoughts about this subject; to paraphrase a famous advertisement for the RSPCA, real compassion, authentic caring and genuine altruism at work are not just for Christmas, they’re for life.  What attitude can you change or habit can you inculcate in 2012 that will improve your working life and the working lives of others?  And the last words go to Bacharach and David, expressed beautifully by Dionne Warwick.  He goes on to say that love is “not just for some, but for everyone”.  Who can you show more care for at work? 

This article is dedicated to my father, Jack Wenger, who died on December 18, 2009.  What I know from the people who worked with him as their Manager, he was a much loved boss who cared very much about the welfare of his people.

What if the boss is a psychopath?

In the last few weeks, I have come across two fascinating pieces, both of which stimulated some thinking about organisational life.  One was about empathy, the other about psychopathy in bosses.  I have drawn on these two in the writing of this article and I hope that you will find some value here.

In my past, I have worked with a few clients who had been clinically diagnosed with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, the more accurate term for psychopaths, and I know how challenging it can be and the fragmentation people like this create around them.  While I stress that I am not qualified to make a clinical diagnosis of Anti-Social Personality Disorder, and I would strenuously caution anyone else who is not qualified against doing so, there are some hallmark behaviours which can only be ignored for so long.

Scientists believe that about 1% of the general population would fit a diagnosis of Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD).  Studies show that as many as 4% of bosses would fit this classification.  When we think of the word psychopathic, we tend to think of mass murderers and serial rapists, however, a psychopath may not necessarily be the Hannibal Lecter of our nightmares.  The thing that most clearly identifies this kind of person for me is a lack of empathy for others.

Professor Simon Baron Cohen discusses empathy and says it has two components: cognitive and affective.  The cognitive component is the drive to identify another person’s thoughts and feelings; the affective component is the drive to respond appropriately to another person’s thoughts and feelings.  Professor Baron Cohen indicates that if you have one without the other, that wouldn’t be empathy.  The psycopath might be able to do the first part, they might be able to recognise their victim has pain, but they might not have the appropriate emotional response of wanting to alleviate their distress.  He goes on to say that empathy is on a spectrum.  Philosopher Martin Buber suggested that the point along the spectrum at which you start treating a person as an object is when you become capable of cruelty.

As Professor Baron Cohen suggests, calling humans ‘resources’ seems to be somewhere down the left hand (lower) side of the bell curve of empathy.  We have inherited, from the Victorians and Industrial Revolutionaries, a notion that people are resources to be deployed in the pursuit of profit.  The moment when you shift from seeing people from an I-Thou perspective to an I-It perspective is when you switch off your empathy.  I-You is where you recognise the person’s subjectivity.  I-It is where you treat someone as a piece of furniture.  Zero empathy is not good for the person, nor for the people around the person.

Professor Baron Cohen goes on to say that empathy is the most valuable of human resources.  After much reflection, I would say that in the realm of business life, I would concur.  Without it, I cannot see how organisations will thrive in the 21st century.  With it, we have a basic foundation of resolving conflict and creating workplaces where people can find meaning, joy and genuine engagement at work.  Without empathy and its expression, an organisation may survive, but the risk is that it is found wanting by those it wishes to engage and becomes irrelevant.  A key point about empathy is that you cannot fake it, and those who work for a psychopathic boss know that.

Once again, while I caution against diagnosing the boss as a psychopath, here some of the things you would typically see in a low empathy manager.

• It is never their fault.  Their default mode is to deflect conversations away from themselves.  They minimise the effects of their improper actions and blame those on the receiving end (“They shouldn’t have spoken to me in that way.”).
• You are never right and you can never win.  Add in the fact that they are the boss and any challenge you make to what you feel is unfair, a personal attack or unethical will be met with more undermining.  They know that they are the boss and believe that they can do anything they like and they know it.  When, on the odd occasion, someone calls them to account, they are clever enough to divert attention away from themselves and blame others for failures and mistakes.
• They run the business like it’s their personal fiefdom.  They take the approach that you can either fit in or **** off.  If you don’t like it, there is the door.  Sadly, I have spoken to too many people who are living proof of the adage, “People join good organisations, but they leave bad managers.”  In the current climate, however, people will be more reluctant to leave even an anti-social boss, lest they find themselves one of the growing number of unemployed.
• They sabotage, undermine and disempower as a matter of course and they lack remorse.  They defend their anti-social actions and comments as being “for the good of the business”, but there is no such thing as a benevolent psychopath.  If they are running the business as their personal fiefdom, that which is different from them is perceived and acted upon as a threat.
• They hold a skewed picture of the business.  Lower self-awareness and a distorted view of self can lead them to maintain the fallacy that everything is just fine.  They will maintain the illusion that it’s one big happy family, that everyone comes in and does their job and nobody complains.  The ones that do complain are probably viewed as ‘difficult’ and the boss will do what they can to undermine and disempower.  The tension between the boss and these recalcitrant workers is palpable and because the boss is a seasoned manipulator, they will deftly skew others’ picture of this person.
• They often successfully feign care and concern for others.  These types of bosses are clever.  They know that strong people skills are the currency of good leadership these days.  On the receiving end of such inauthentic caring, however, you can feel it.  It’s just hard to put your finger on.
• They disguise their anti-social behaviour with sophisticated language and reasonable justification.  They have a charm that they can turn on and off as the situation suits them.  On their journey to a leadership position, they have found it useful along the way to learn the sophisticated kind of language used to cover up and obfuscate, so their anti-social behaviours are hard to pin down.
• They display an easy contempt for people they don’t like or agree with.  They tend to have poor ability to inhibit angry outbursts.  They shut people and conversations down that differ from their world view.
• They put people down on a personal level.   They lack caring and display a blithe indifference to the fact that they manage human beings with feelings, lives and stories to tell.

It is important to remember that a boss who, in a moment of stress or anxiety, lashes out at staff, but then makes genuine attempts to repair the relationship would not fit in this category.  The boss who normally displays genuine caring, authentic self-reflectiveness and humility and a valuing of diversity, but who, on occasion acts out of such human emotions as jealousy, anger or fear is not to be considered anti-social.  Only if there is a consistent pattern of anti-social behaviour, is it the time to let go of our naivety and seek out alternative courses of action.

A psychopathic boss’s casual use of interpersonal violence can be breath-taking.  In some cases, it washes over us because it’s so outrageous that we can hardly believe that someone, the boss no less, would behave in this consistently disrespectful manner.  It’s not until we walk away and we recover ourselves that we realise that the wrenching we felt in our gut was to do with them.  I have spoken with people who have been victims of a boss such as this, and they consistently report that it took some time before it dawned on them how inappropriate their boss was behaving towards them.  We also like to think that we don’t come into contact with people like this; after all a psychopath is a mass murderer, right?  We also tend to associate the words and actions of a bully with the sort of thing that goes on in school playgrounds and can’t imagine that we, now grown adults, would be on the receiving end of it.

If someone is determined to go against the psychopathic boss, they may quickly find themselves on the wrong end of dismissal.  Because the boss knows they are the boss, they will find some way to manage you out, perhaps by placing such unrealistic conditions on your employment that they are unattainable or by isolating the ‘miscreant’ by setting them up to fail in the eyes of their peers.  This way, they have some evidence to point to why this person just had to go.  Some people who cannot see their way through end up leaving, but these are probably the people that the psychopath calls trouble-makers and will feel vindicated upon their departure.  They will maintain that it was better for the business that they went and will be happier with a more compliant or acquiescent replacement.

I generally take a holistic view of people and try to see past unsavoury behaviours in order to seek out the personal value systems that underlie them, by way of finding a starting point for strengths-based development work.  In other words, I like to give the benefit of the doubt.  This has not always stood me in good stead and on a few occasions, I have erred on the side of generosity; it is on these occasions that I have eventually had to relent in the face of repeated anti-social acts towards myself or others and given way to the reality that the person in question was indeed, deeply lacking in empathy and care for others.  While it can be tempting to reduce someone to a few of their ‘bad’ behaviours, I would still encourage you to start with generosity: give the benefit of the doubt.  Goodness knows that the world could do with greater understanding of our fellow humans.  Very few of us are truly selfish ‘bad eggs’ and I still hold that it is worth giving the benefit of the doubt in the first instance.  Furthermore, it can be incredibly frustrating to be misrepresented based on a few forgivable misdemeanours in the workplace and to not be given the opportunity to apologise, put things right and make genuine efforts to adjust behaviour.

As frustrating as it is to be in the firing line of a low empathy boss, there are some things that we can do:

1. Trust your gut.  A common thread for those with a psychopathic boss is that they feel like they can’t trust their instincts about what happens to them at work.  This is one of the things that these creatures create in those around them.  Like Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight”, you are probably not going mad.
2. Talk with someone you trust about your experiences.  Bounce your experiences off someone.  Get things off your chest, it does you no good to store up your frustrations and stress.  A trusted friend can also reflect back whether you are seeing things accurately of if you are making mountains out of molehills.
3. If necessary, get some legal or HR guidance. Some common advice is to document everything.  Check with a professional and get some guidance as to what you should be doing to protect yourself.
4. Maintain habits that keep you grounded and connected to yourself.  Get a massage, go for a walk in nature, play a musical instrument, meditate, whatever works for you.

As always, I welcome your comments and look forward to hearing how you have dealt with an anti-social boss at work.

Managing change. Really?

These are, indeed, interesting times.  We are bombarded, seemingly daily, with a slew of economic, social and environmental information which paints an ever more complex picture of what is going on in our world, our communities and our workplaces.  Depending on the lenses through which we view this data, which data we choose to look at and which we choose to ignore, each of us, individually or in our ‘tribes’, make particular meaning of them.  Either the global ice caps are about to melt and our major cities about to be submerged as sea levels rise, or we are simply experiencing the normal pattern of global warming and cooling that has been cycling for time immemorial.  Either we are in the grip of the worst financial crisis ever or it is simply that we have run up more debt that we should have and we just need to tighten our belts for a little while until we get back to business-as-usual (whatever that is).

There does seem to be a consensus, however, that the only constant is change.  I think it would also be hard to refute that the pace of change is increasing, as new technologies influence how we connect with each other, how we work and how we manage information and knowledge.  Sometimes the changes we experience are of our own making because we realise that the status quo is no longer tenable, sometimes the changes are inflicted upon us.

Call it semantics, but I’d like to suggest that navigating through constant change is not so much about ‘managing’ it, for this, to me, implies keeping some sort of rein on it, both the change and our response to it.  Canute-like, we wearily try to manage something which is unmanageable.  I would like to propose that what is needed is learning to embrace change, developing greater spontaneity, deepening our capabilities to relate to others well and growing the capacity to learn and reflect in the midst of all this change.

To illustrate, let me introduce you to C1 and C2, two CEO’s of medium-sized knowledge-based organisations.  They are both successful in their own right, both have been around for years, both of them know their organisations well.  Both of them are big-hearted and have enormous passion for the work they and their organisations carry out.  They are both extremely like-able and well-rounded human beings.  We might say that both of their organisations are also successful, purely in the sense that they are still around, despite challenging economic times.  Both of these organisations also operate in the same industry with very similar challenges.  But if we look a little closer at these two CEO’s and their organisations, we might not say that they are equally successful.  World-1, the world of C1, while still functioning, suffers from high staff turnover, low job satisfaction amongst the majority of employees and the kind of poor engagement that leads to staff actively bad-mouthing the place.  World-2, the domain of C2, has extremely low turnover with people clamouring to work there, high levels of engagement to the point of staff bragging about where they work and excellent standards of performance.

C1 is great at managing.  He forecasts, he plans, he commands.  He has been around for many years and knows the organisation inside out.  He structures, he re-structures, he is a very busy man.  He prides himself on an impressive set of policies and procedures which are constantly under revision; when someone does something that he feels sits outside the organisation’s vision, he puts another new policy in place to mitigate it ever happening again.  He tells people about the organisation’s business models, which he constantly invents and re-invents at a pace which keeps people just confused enough so that they don’t manage to really grasp them fully.  Just as people seem to understand and come on board with the new model, another one appears.  He doesn’t set out to bamboozle people, but that is how they experience his constant re-inventions and modifications.

C1 likes to make pronouncements about diversity.  To talk to C1 and to read the organisational documents, you would think that they had reached some sort of diversity-nirvana.  In practice, what you would see is a diverse micro-cosm of wider society with employees from a range of ethnic backgrounds, creeds and sexual orientations being shoe-horned into C1′s monocultural worldview.  Groupthink is the norm and new staff learn quickly to conform.  Margaret Mead could have been talking about C1 when she said, “What people say, what people do and what people say they do are entirely different things.”

In C2′s world, there are actually few formal pronouncements, discussions or debates around diversity.  What you would see if you went into their domain, however, is a workplace characterised by acceptance of difference, active mutual respect, valuing of diverse contributions from a similar microcosm of the wider society and an organic and evolving culture which is constantly emergent from the interactions and relationships between everyone there.  World-2 is messier, in a ‘we-aren’t-the-same-as-each-other’ kind of way, and this seems to create a real hot-house out of which spring genuinely novel and effective responses to clients and other stakeholders.  World-2 often surprises itself and delights its external stakeholders with the kind of creativity that emerges from its diverse culture and people are compelled to come to work because it feels good.

In World-1, there is a heavy reliance on policies and procedures to maintain order.  This leaves little room for individual creativity, for much of people’s daily work is delineated by the ‘Such-and-Such Manual’ or the ‘So-and-So Handbook’.  The fear orientation, out of which this springs, means that the workplace hums to the background music of “Don’t Make Mistakes,” which then means that people default to endless, time-consuming conversations about whether they are doing the ‘right’ thing before making any move.  People’s frame of reference is “What will C1 think is correct?” rather than “I feel trusted, along with my colleagues, to come up with the most appropriate course of action,” and there are so many policy documents that nobody could possibly know them all anyway.  This over-reliance on codifying means that people’s view of the bigger picture is so obscured by manuals and charts that they have lost their clear line of sight to the organisation’s purpose.   The only person to whom this seems clear is C1.

C2 knows that every organisation needs a certain number of policies, procedures and standard processes that provide enough of an agreed-upon structure within which to work. However, World-2 is light on documentation, providing only that which sets out clear, comprehensible guidelines and secures sensible levels of health and safety.  World-2′s modus operandi could be called ‘emergent design’, with new ways of working emerging from necessity and the melting pot of staff interactions.  There is a thriving culture of experimentation and reflection.  People actually look forward to staff meetings because they are mostly filled with idea-generation and  robust analysis of ‘what is working and how can we improve?’.

C1 loves hierarchies.  C1 loves organisational charts.  C1 gets a thrill when he identifies some kind of need for a new level of company structure and can redraw reporting lines.  For a medium sized organisation, World-1 has an inordinately complicated structure.  C2, who runs a similarly sized organisation, seems to know that the flatter the structure, the more agile it will be in its decision-making and the more responsive its navigation will be through the fast-changing world.  C2 appears to keep a gentle hand on the tiller, always aware of what is going on should his intervention be required, but comfortable in the knowledge that their flatter structure is facilitating greater relationship and interactions between staff, thereby unleashing innovation, creative problem-solving and adaptability.  C2 spends less of his time on organisational hierarchies and more of his time concerning himself with fostering healthy workplace relationships and ensuring a kind of ‘relational hygiene’ through regular team and individual development, coaching and mentoring.  World-1 is struggling to keep up with change by re-jigging its organisational charts and process documentation, by which time the rest of the world has moved on; World-2 is adapting and responding to the environment in real time by drawing on good relationship and robust workplace conversations.  World-1 keeps missing the bus; World-2 is driving it.

What could World-1 do to become more like World-2?  

1) Grow a practice of reflection: develop the habit of reflecting and integrating.  A working week should have time built in for reflecting on the work: what is working well and what needs adjusting.  Be conscious of growing this habit or the speed of the world about us can overwhelm.  If you sit at a sushi roundabout with food constantly flowing past, it can be tempting to try to grab at everything, without awareness and attention eating more and more quickly.  Take time to savour what you are eating and let it digest before eating the next piece.  So it is with events at work.  Taking the time to digest, integrate and make meaning will lead to less indigestion and greater readiness to deal with the next thing.

2) Learn by doing: develop the habit of trying things out.  Modelling and growing a culture of experimentation and what Dr. Mark Batey calls ‘intelligent failure’ will begin to unleash the creativity that each person brings to the workplace.  This requires developing personal capabilities related to ‘letting go of control’ and ‘knowing and trusting others’, among others.  Support people to make their best contribution to the system, rather than emphasising mechanical measures of individual KPIs.

3) Grow self-awareness: develop the habit of self-reflectiveness.  Some of the latest research from the world of neuroscience is telling us, for example, that knowing and naming our feelings leaves us less at their behest and more able to respond appropriately to things around us.  Change can bring up scary feelings and if we learn about ourselves and how we feel about change, it can point the way to what we need to learn so that change is something we embrace, rather than something to manage.   If you are interested to know more, Louise Altman writes some intelligent articles on emotional literacy, mindfulness and awareness.

4) Grow your spontaneity: develop the habit of improvising.  Good actors are also good improvisors, and the good ones have learnt how to do this; it’s no accident.  As ‘act-ors’ in our own lives, we can also be better improvisors.  Learning to develop our spontaneity, or our readiness state, will allow us to produce good responses to the sort of unpredictability inherent in change.

5) Increase employee contribution: develop the habit of consulting.  Treat policies and procedures as living documents.  They should be easily understood and relevant.  Listen to staff and find out if they provide good guidance or if they are stifling creativity and responsiveness.

6) Grow diversity: develop the habit of love and care.  This may seem a little out of place for some, but when people have deep regard for others, when they develop the ability to reverse roles with others and when they grow the kind of self-confidence that doesn’t need to knock others, we are getting closer to diversity.  This is important because diversity is one of the fertilisers of innovation and creativity in workplaces; and innovation and creativity are two key ingredients to making your way through change.

None of these things, on their own, will necessarily make change easier to navigate.  Taken together, they will catalyse a systemic shift in workplace attitude and behaviour.  And, as always, this needs to be led and modelled from the top of the organisation.  This can be the hard bit because it its current state, with the current mindset, C1 will feel that these shifts are a danger to World-1 and to be avoided.  But then, he’d be right.

That’s my two cents on this for now and as always, I’m keen to hear what you can add on the subject.

Can I trust you?

A poll in October of 2011 put the approval rating of the US Congress at just 9%.  When Rasmussen pollsters asked Americans if they approved of the US going communist, a full 11% said they were OK with that; two points ahead of Congress.  To put that into context, during Watergate Richard Nixon’s approval rating was 24%. BP, during the Gulf oil spill, hit 16 %.

To me, these figures illustrate the erosion of trust in those who set out to lead us and, I suspect, an erosion of faith in the systems that puts those leaders there.  It’s not just a crisis of democracy, it’s a much wider crisis of leadership: in government, in business, in churches.  The expenses scandal in the UK.  Widespread sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests and covered up by bishops.  Credit ratings agencies giving the thumbs up to banking systems at the heart of the global financial crisis.  Bankers gifting themselves ever larger bonuses with the taxpayer money that bailed them out.  Politicians and police exposed as bed-fellows with News International as the cruel depths of their phone hacking emerges.  So-called ‘democratic’ world leaders sitting close-lipped on genuinely popular uprisings in Egypt and Syria unless it suits them.  In response, first the indignados and then the occupy movements around the world mobilise in an effort to give voice to their myriad frustrations with ‘the system’ because they see little joy in working within the systems which already exist, seen as corrupt, untrustworthy and anti-democratic.  The faith that people have lost is not simply in the people who purport to lead; it is in the actual systems.

In this article, “America is Better Than This,” Burdett Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas comments on the spectacle of the US Congress classifying pizza sauce as a vegetable in deference to the fast food lobby, who wish to continue serving it to America’s schoolchildren.  Loomis is quoted in the article as saying, “…if they can’t get it right on pizza sauce, how can they do something on the deficit, or healthcare?”  Politics has, for many folks, been reduced to a source of entertainment rather than a channel through which to effect real change in our societies.  ’Election promise’ has long become a byword for mendacity.  In New Zealand, the incumbent National Party, led by Prime Minister John Key, is seeking a second term in the upcoming general election, having raised Goods and Services Tax only 18 months after undertaking not to do so during the election campaign of November 2008.  This, despite Prime Minister Key stating during the 2008 campaign, “I intend to campaign on trust. I intend to be a Prime Minister that earns the trust of New Zealanders and I’m going to keep that trust.”  Loomis has a good point: if we can’t trust those in positions of leadership to act with integrity and common sense on small matters, how on Earth can we trust them with larger concerns?

In our quest for authentic leadership, those who aspire to lead or purport to lead need to understand that the issue is not ‘the issues’; the issue is ‘trust’.  I don’t care if you have a solid understanding of economics or IT; my real question is “Can I trust you to lead?”  Just as importantly, can I trust a system that put you there?  If the system continually puts people in positions of power who abuse it, many are asking, isn’t it time we had a new system?  This is the promised land that the systems thinkers among us have been dreaming of.  The ‘something new’ that seems to be emerging, the new paradigm of leadership, is not one of hierarchies or command and control.  It is one of networks, relationships and action.  It is of ‘leader-full’ systems, rather than leaders of hierarchies.  Old style leaders and leadership systems are fast becoming irrelevant before our very eyes.  Leadership in the 21st century is going to be more about relationships and influence, interconnectedness and networks, trust and authenticity.  Leadership, as a phenomenon, will emerge from the dynamic between people, and this may not necessarily conform to an organisational hierarchy.  Many old-style thinkers look at the occupy movements and scratch their heads because they genuinely can’t make sense of it: “Where are their leaders?” “What are their demands?”  They don’t get that this new paradigm will be populated by ‘leader-full’ networks, empowered to take action themselves rather than via ‘representatives’.

These leader-full networks will be populated by people exercising authentic leadership: being themselves; bringing forward their own sets of knowledge and capabilities; exercising their own brand of action.  Central to this will be engendering trust throughout the network, maintaining good relationships and purposeful influence.  It won’t happen because you tell me that I can trust you.  It will happen because you behave in a trustworthy manner.  Remember that 85-90% of people’s attention goes on a leader’s informal, unconscious communications.  The traditional activities that we attribute to a ‘leader’, as shown in the formal, conscious box below, only garner about 3-5% of people’s attention.  Even today, about 80-85% of a typical leader’s effort goes into that category of communications that are least noticed. (Acknowledgements to Marcus Child for sharing this model with me.)

informal	discussions conversations remarks debates	body language tone of voice attitude energy emotional connection style
formal	speeches announcements aims and objectives policy statements vision and mission documentation	processes promotions use of measurements and statistics
	conscious	unconscious

 

A new manifesto of trust

Want me to trust you? Be a man (or woman) of your word; not a man (or woman) of words.  Words don’t cut it.  I’ve been lied to too many times.  I want to see trustworthy action.  Let’s instigate a manifesto of trust.  It could say something like this:

• I will strive to build and maintain good relationships with all.
• If I make a promise or a commitment, I will strive to keep it;
• If I break a promise or ‘drop the ball’ with my commitments, I will front up and be accountable and I will work to put things right.
• No excuses, no blaming, no avoiding, no sweeping under the carpet.
• No wriggling out of embarrassing conversations or trying to change the subject.
• I will endeavour to be real with people; no obfuscation, no power games.
• I will strive to develop myself: this means becoming more self-reflective and more open to others’ feedback about me.

While John Key and others in our political classes will try to garner trust simply by saying, “You can trust me,” true leaders know that trust follows trustworthy behaviour.  That’s it really.  In any election campaign, all the stuff about the economy, education or health is important, but as we listen to election messages, the key thing to consider is, “Can I actually trust you?  How can I believe what you are telling me (about the economy, education and health)?”  When I hear the expression, “Let me be really clear about the facts,” I know that what follows is more likely to be distortions.

In the realm of customer service, trust doesn’t come because you’ve won some customer care award or you have the biggest share of the market.  It comes because when I interact with you, I feel that you are really listening to me and giving me your undivided attention.   I get the unshakable sense that you are taking my concerns seriously and that you are not following some sort of customer service script.  I trust you when you treat me like an intelligent human being and don’t patronise me with your “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” attitude.  At the same time, help me to understand, rather than blind me with your jargon.  I might trust you if I felt you weren’t just using language to pull the wool over my eyes.

In the realm of the workplace, I will trust you when I feel that you value my contributions and that you encourage others to do the same.  I will trust you when you are constant.  A psychologist friend of mine had a mantra which went, “The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.”  While I don’t agree with that entirely , there is some truth in it.  My trust in you will build over time, when you are repeatedly and consistently authentic and trustWORTHY.  You will not necessarily gain my trust simply because you have set up some simplistic ‘trust games’ during our one and only staff training day.

Resist the urge to get indignant.  Perhaps this is your default response: “How DARE you! It sounds as if you don’t trust me.”  Rather than throw it all back onto me, as if my lack of trust in you is somehow an indication of a defect in me, why not go away and think about what it is about your actions that might somehow engender mistrust.  If you have a track record of not following through with commitments, then my mistrust is probably well-placed.

I’ll close with a note about cynics, because in the face of broken trust, it is easy to become cynical about people.  Cynicism has, however, taken on a negative connotation in modern society, where it was once thought to be a virtue.  Cynics were of an ancient Greek school of philosophy.  The example of the Cynic’s life (and the use of the Cynic’s biting satire) would dig up and expose the pretensions which lay at the root of everyday conventions.  Cynicism offered people the possibility of happiness and freedom from suffering in an age of uncertainty. The ideal Cynic would evangelise; as the watchdog of humanity, it was their job to hound people about the error of their ways. (Wikipedia entry on Cynicism)

In these mendacious times, in a changing world where trust is becoming the chief currency, nothing wrong with a little healthy cynicism, eh?

Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there

In an increasingly connected and interactive world, where your customers can directly engage with you via social media, where you can measure and survey in order to take your organisation’s pulse, one essential role for us all to develop is The Open Receptive Learner.  This role encapsulates those capabilities related to receiving, processing and making meaning of feedback.  I’ll break my own rule about the use of the word ‘feedback’ because it is a useful shorthand, however, I still maintain my aversion to it and I still cannot seem to shake my old teacher’s suggestion that feedback is that dissonant racket that comes out of a speaker system.

It is valuable to consider this aspect of leader development and customer service because, in the Knowledge Age, the more responsive we are to all kinds of information, the better we will be at dealing with change, uncertainty, emergence and complexity.  I will add that The Open Receptive Learner is but one in an interconnected and complex matrix of ‘responsiveness’ and ‘self awareness’ roles, but those other roles can be the subject of another article.

If you have a well-developed role of Open Receptive Learner, you will be comfortable hearing things about yourself that have been hitherto unknown, you will be open to the notion that there may be some truth in what others tell you about yourself and you will give their comments due consideration, you will receive feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness and you will endeavour to synthesise feedback in a way that causes you to expand your view of yourself.  What this looks and feels like:  when you are enacting this role, you may respond to others’ feedback by asking further naive questions in an interested tone of voice, in order to gain greater insight into yourself; when you are enacting this role, you may notice that can ably quieten your internal voices that want to react to feedback with justification or argument; when you are in this role, you may notice your body language conveys a relaxed, yet alert, demeanour as you demonstrate genuine curiosity and interest in what the other person is saying.

We solicit feedback when we ask for it directly, when we conduct some sort of culture survey or a leadership 360 or when we invite customers to interact with us on social media.  Even solicited feedback can cause us to respond out of denial, narcissism, arrogance or fear, notably when we hear something unexpected or that is less than complimentary.  While it’s not ideal, it’s understandable, as we are all human and we all have an amygdala which goes off like a car alarm, unable to distinguish between real and perceived danger.  Some of us have just been wired over our lives to be more vigilant than others.  If this is the case, we have human technologies at our disposal to rewire this default response.  What we have been learning in the last decade or so from neuroscience also tells us that we are far more ‘plastic’ than we used to believe.

What about when we receive unsolicited feedback?  We use expressions like, “I felt like I was being blindsided”, “I would never have seen that coming” or “That came out of nowhere”. This is similar to when we attempt to change lanes on the motorway and suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we hear this loud honk and at the last minute, seeing where the desperate honking is coming from, swerve back into our lane to avoid a crash with the other car that did not, in fact, appear out of nowhere; we simply did not see it.  This can be related to a phenomenon called inattention blindness.  If you have ever seen a magician or illusionist, you will be familiar with how they use this natural tendency in order to entertain, and it is now becoming the stuff of documentary TV channels as we become increasingly interested in how our brains function and how to develop greater self awareness. The most well-known example of inattention blindness was used as a public service advertisement in the UK, trying to get drivers to become more aware of cyclists.

In essence, inattention blindness is when we are unable to see something even if it is plain sight.  When combined with another human phenomenon, asymmetric insight, we will go through our lives with skewed pictures of ourselves.  If we embark on a journey of self-knowledge, we will make some headway in mitigating for these cognitive distortions.  However, we cannot know all there is to know about ourselves simply by developing the role of Self-Reflector.  We require input from others and it is the height of arrogance to believe that information and feedback from others is to be dismissed blithely.

However, herein lies a major conundrum.  If inattention blindness is the inability to see something that is in plain sight and if we all suffer from it, we can accept that it is important to be open to feedback from others.  Intellectually, we can accept that there will be things about ourselves that are in plain sight, but to which we will be blind.  What if, however, the thing that is in plain view of everyone except ourselves, is that we are bad at taking feedback; that our limbic fight/flight/freeze mechanism is so overpowering that we are simply not able to take in any feedback that has just the merest whiff of unpleasantness.  It’s a negative loop.  What if the feedback is that we are bad at taking feedback?  Your emotions go from zero to 60 in an uncontrollable nano-second because your amygdala has somehow got the wrong end of the stick.  It’s just information, but it’s received as a danger and you over-react.  In the words of Radiohead, “Just ’cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.  We are accidents waiting to happen.”  Damn limbic system.

With this in mind, how do we go about developing the (under-developed) role of Open Receptive Learner if we have already come to the firm conclusion that we are open to feedback but our defensive shields are permanently on red alert?  If you believe that you are good at receiving feedback, how would you know?  If your amygdala is wired such that it detects danger at the slightest hint of criticism, you will be its slave when someone attempts to say, “You are not terribly good at hearing feedback about yourself,” and it floods your body with hormones, inhibiting and distorting the ability of your neocortex to take in and process information.  This essential piece of information is unlikely to get through, thereby scuppering your efforts.  It’s unconscious self-sabotage.

My intention in this article is not to create despondency, rather I wish to pose a pertinent question that all of us interested in self-development must come to grips with.  I believe that pondering questions such as this is not simply an intellectual exercise, rather it is exercising our self-awareness muscles.  In an age when the depth and quality of our self-knowledge is so core to how we are at work, with our peers, our staff, our customers and with our communities; this is no whimsical self-indulgence.  It is part of preparing ourselves for the greater uncertainty and ambiguity that characterises the Knowledge Age.

Warm up to the role of Open Receptive Learner

Here is a process that may assist you to become better at receiving feedback.  If you are in a leadership position, it is probably true that the higher up the ‘food chain’ you are, the less you will know about your business and what its staff really think of you.  If you are genuinely interested in knowing more about yourself and your organisation and encouraging more frank feedback to come your way, bring to mind someone you know who has this role well-developed.  We’ll call this person X.  You have seen them do it or they have a reputation for doing it.  You hear people say things like, “I feel so comfortable telling her what I think, she is such a good listener, even when I’m saying difficult things,” or “I get a really good sense that he listens to what people tell him about his performance.  He seems really interested in knowing what people think about him.”

When you are about to engage in a feedback-type conversation with someone, think to yourself, “What would X do?” and be in the role of that person.  What emotional state would they likely be in, what kind of words or phrases would they use in the conversation, how would they be physically?  As you develop your Open Receptive Learner, you will need to stay conscious of warming up to this role, just as you had to stay fully conscious of ‘clutch, engage gear, depress accelerator, slowly release clutch’ until driving was second nature to you.

Alternatively, if you find yourself blindsided by someone’s feedback, STOP.  If you find it difficult to stop the inner voices, to keep breathing, to bring your heartbeat back to a normal rate, it could be useful to investigate mindfulness training.  Practicing the discipline of mindfulness will go a long way to assisting you to gain greater self-control in your life.

As usual, I look forward to comments on this article.  Go well.