Your Worst Working Moment

Think of one of your best working moments.  One of those times when you felt on top of the world, when you were just ‘flowing’ or when you felt the warm glow of success.  It could have been when you closed that important deal, when you finally got through to your under-performing staff while at the same time growing positive working relationships or when you overcame your fears to achieve a breakthrough of some sort.  You will doubtless have many of these moments; right now, focus on just one of them.  Recall what you were doing, who was with you, how you felt, how others responded to you.

Now bring to mind your worst working moment.  That time you wanted the earth to open up and swallow you, when you felt so bad that you couldn’t look others in the eyes, that moment you would like to wipe from your memory because the mere thought of it ties your stomach in knots.  I won’t ask you to dwell on this for too long, lest it has the power to infect you today.

I will lay good money on two things: 1) the thing that made your peak moment so awesome and your worst moment so dreadful was probably not to do with technical expertise or lack thereof, it was more likely to do with your personal capabilities, and; 2) the thing that made these  moments what they were, are unique to you and your makeup.

I want to address these two assertions because they have important implications for leader development.  Spoiler alert: some of what follows may incense some readers.

Assertion 1: Technical know-how vs. personal capability:  This assertion points to a phenomenon which is already evident, that is, people and organisations are becoming more discerning in how they spend their time, effort and money on workplace training.  For one thing, more people are slowly coming to understand the difference between training and development.  I said a little more about this in a previous blog article, “Are you Investing in Sticky Learning?”.  Neuroscience is now proving what people like Jakob Moreno knew intuitively back in the 1920′s: that we go on learning and developing until the day we die.  Neuroscience is also giving us more hard evidence on how learning happens and it behoves us to respond to new facts and information by radically altering how we teach leadership.  More organisations are coming round to the idea that what makes us up as humans is pivotal to how we execute our work, even if they don’t know what to do about that.  We are living in an age when our personal beliefs and values, our emotions and our motivations must be accorded their due attention when it comes to performance at work.  While technical information and job-specific content is, of course, absolutely essential in order to carry out our jobs, they are not sufficient.  They are merely the ‘what’.

Who we are, as people, drives how we carry out our jobs, and organisations ignore this at their peril.  It is not enough to pay it lip service.  A genuine effort must be made to incorporate real and significant personal development into workplace learning.  There is a world of difference, for example, between learning about interpersonal skills and developing interpersonal skills.  Given the current state of learning and development offerings, if I were to attend a training seminar about Communication Skills, I would expect to come away with not much more than a sheaf of notes and information.  As far as I’m concerned, a waste of my time and money.  I’ve just done a google search: ‘How can I improve my communication skills?” brought up 74, 700,000 results.  We don’t need more information about stuff.  If you are still sending your people on an annual sales seminar and your sales figures aren’t changing, I would suggest you try something different.  Invest in something which grows capability, not adds information.  This is especially true the higher up the food chain you are.  If you are managing people, are at C-level or are hovering around C-level, your job is less about technical expertise and more about intra- and inter-personal capability.  Capability, mind you; not knowledge.

Assertion 2: The #1 capability that you should learn:  The thing that made your worst working moment so horrendous was unique to you.  I realise I may upset even more folks with this second point….but give. me. strength.  I realise that the rules of engagement on Twitter and other social media dictate some use of hyperbole and superlative, promises of quick enlightenment and feel-good platitudes masquerading as wisdom, in order to draw attention to yourself.  Social media ‘gurus’ even tell you this is how to get noticed; and I’m reminded of Peter Drucker’s quote: “We are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.”

Using these linguistic devices is tempting.  I succumb to this temptation myself; look at the title of this section.  The breathtaking cheek!  I also use tweet-scheduling on TweetDeck. Such audacity!  However, I tire of the “Ten Top Tips When Having Difficult Conversations at Work” or “The #1 Most Important Food Group Every Leader Should Eat for Breakfast”, when, in the realm of human development, there is truly no such thing.  Human development is not one-size-fits-all, nor paint-by-numbers.  We are still infected by the old mechanistic, cause-and-effect paradigm of seeing the world, hence we are compelled to read something when it promises enlightenment in five easy steps.  I do it all the time.  And I’m left wanting.  The world is not that simplistic nor black and white, and neither are we humans.  There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.  If you are looking for the #1 capability that will transform you and make your working life 73% more satisfying, read no further.  I don’t have the answer.

Well, I do, actually.  But I don’t.

The answer is: the one that YOU most require.  Training and development courses promise to provide you with learning that is relevant to you, but how many actually work with YOUR real concerns, help you to really overcome the things that catch YOU out, assist you to really face the things that scare YOU?  How many of these courses actually leave you a different person when you walk out of the room?  I am not suggesting a day of getting naked with your colleagues.  A learning programme is tailor-made when it accommodates your learning styles and preferences, when it takes account of your current knowledge and capabilities and builds on those, when what is learnt is directly relevant and applicable in your day-to-day and when the providers tune into you and what transformation you are at the threshold of.

How do you work out what you need to develop?  Some of us just know.  If you have embarked on a path of self-knowledge, you are likely to have some sense of the areas within yourself that require further growth and development.  There will be other areas that are less known to you.  We can surround ourselves with trusted friends and associates who don’t shy away from sharing uncomfortable truths with us.  We can develop mindfulness: this is not sitting on a yoga mat burning jossticks (although it may include this); it is developing a discipline of non-judgemental self-observance.  Just like our communities and workplaces, we are complex systems within systems.  The Top Ten Whatevers may be interesting bits of information, but they are unlikely to transform you.

The point again: what is the #1 capability you should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that YOU most need; right now in your life, taking account of what you already know and know how to do and your current situation in life.

Feedback or noise?

I’ve been noticing just lately that this word ‘feedback’ keeps coming up.  Specifically, it’s being used in the context of letting someone know something about their behaviour or attitude.  This isn’t an uncommon word and in workplaces everywhere, people are being encouraged to give ‘feedback’ to each other…..Managers to staff….co-workers to co-workers….in fact, people all over the place to other people all over the place.

Years ago, a wise and much-loved teacher of mine remarked that he never used the word ‘feedback’ when sharing information with someone about their performance.  He likened it to the kind of feedback that you get from the speaker on your sound system—grating, dissonant noise.  Since that time, I have found myself bristling every time I hear someone say something like, “Can I give you some feedback about what you just did?” or “I think I need to give my staff some feedback about that last project.”

I have to say I tend to agree with his take on the word.  I have worked with a fair number of Managers who have to conduct performance reviews with their staff and they talk about giving feedback.  And I suspect that is more or less what it sounds like to their staff—grating, dissonant noise.  Consider the person about to enter the Manager’s office for a performance review.  Consider the thoughts and feelings that will be going through them.  Consider the slightly sweaty palms, the slightly shallower-than-normal breathing, the increased heart rate….all signs of nervousness or anxiety.  All limbic responses to potential threat or danger; the Manager is not about to leap out from behind a chair and maul them to death, however the limbic system does not operate on a level or reason or logic.  However, when the limbic system starts to kick into action, it does cause our more evolved ‘thinking brain’ to operate at less than optimal levels and we don’t take information in clearly.  The staff member sits down and the Manager begins a friendly conversation, however the hormones rushing through the staff member’s body have not entirely dissipated.  All they hear is grating, dissonant noise—feedback.

So, I hear you ask, am I suggesting that staff shouldn’t have performance conversations with their Managers?

After all, don’t people want to know how they’re doing?  And don’t organisations have a responsibility to ensure that people are working to an agreed standard?  Of course, emphatically yes to both questions.

I would suggest, however, that it is not the giving of this information that is sometimes flawed; it is HOW it is delivered.  I suspect that there are many people who experience any kind of conversation about their performance as a little challenging.  Indeed, a comment on how we’re doing will naturally elicit some kind of emotional response inside; we are not automatons.  So it behoves the giver of the information to place themselves in the shoes of the receiver and consider how to pass on this really useful information.  It is important to consider time and place.  Most importantly, it is important to consider the relationship.

I like to think of traffic lights when I share information with someone about themselves.  If the light is red, I hold back.  In other words, if I don’t feel I’ve done enough work on building a good, trusting relationship, I will be very careful what I say: not because I’m shy of telling people what I think, but because I want the words to actually be heard clearly and not come across as grating, dissonant noise.  If the light is amber, I’m getting there, but I can’t be as forthright as I would if the light was green.  With a green light, we can let someone know how they are doing in a manner that is honest and open, knowing that they are not feeling threatened or defensive, because we have spent a sufficient amount of time, energy and consideration in building a positive working relationship with them.

Are you investing in ‘sticky’ learning?

So you are thinking about investing in your people.  Of course you are…. you maintain your plant and machinery, you maintain your office spaces, you maintain your computers….so naturally you want to invest in ‘maintaining’ your people.

So what kind of programme do you invest in?  The ‘sticky’ one, of course.  That is, the one which ‘sticks’ with people.  The one which, when people get back to work, has stuck with them so they put their new learning into practice.  Right?

So how do you know which programmes are the ‘sticky’ ones?  I say it depends on the thing you are trying to develop.

The tried and true training paradigm of ‘knowledge transfer’ and the training processes used to effect this transfer have some use, but it’s limited.  This style of learning is more transactional, the transaction being: you sit there and pay attention and I’ll repay that attention with some useful knowledge.  However, the needs of the modern worker and modern organisation have changed.  While this transaction is still useful for some kinds of learning content, if you want to develop communication, teamwork, greater customer focus or leader capability, the ‘sticky’ programme is most often not the one that is laden with information; it’s usually the one that is more about the people than the information.

Furthermore, people want to participate in learning experiences which grow them as human beings, and organisations need people who have honed the kind of capabilities the 21st century world of work actually needs; capabilities such as empathy, courage, increased self awareness, and greater ability to communicate and say challenging things to their peers, their staff and their bosses.

The new paradigm is also one that stops looking at the training budget as something that should solely serve the organisation or deliver a quantifiable return on investment.  You know that if you spend money on an MYOB training course, you have got a return on your investment if the accounts folk use it effectively and productivity in the accounts department increases.  How, though, can you quantify increased empathy skills?  Yet you know in your heart, in your mind, in your gut that when your customer service staff have greater empathy, they go the extra mile for dissatisfied customers and stop them from moving over to your competition.  You know that when your team leaders can have more robust performance conversations with their teams, morale increases, productivity increases, turnover declines.  I’m constantly reminded of the quote that Einstein allegedly had on his wall: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”  We are in an age where this is deliciously applicable.  Yes, we do need to know that investment in developing people gives a return to the organisation, but let’s expand our minds and our ideas of how we ‘measure’ this added value.

In order to develop these things, a new paradigm of learning and development needs to take hold.  People need to be able to participate in learning programmes which are directly relevant to them and which grow them as a person.  Transformational methods, those which Phill Boas of the Melbourne Business School calls ‘high intensity relational processes’, and those which we apply in our work at Quantum Shift, are just the ticket.  These are processes which are sometimes confronting and which “truly stretch people outside their comfort zones to really review their own style, values and preferences and those of others. It’s not always warm and fuzzy. But that is the reality of work and working relationships”.  We can get a picture of the two approaches in this table:

TRANSACTIONAL LEARNING APPROACHES	TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING APPROACHES
One-off training events	Learning over time, with follow-up
‘Chalk and talk’ transfer of information	Experiential and interactive
Content-orientated	Orientated to learning as a process
Predominantly factual	Involves feelings and relationships
Methodical, step-by-step, logical-sequential	Divergent and unpredictable
Linear	Developmental
Conceptual	Behavioural and attitudinal
What to do	How to do it