Leadership Development Archives - Page 2 of 3

The elephant and the rider

I’ve recently finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating book the ‘happiness hypothesis’. Don’t let the title put you off – this is not pop self-help psychology but a well crafted and stimulating book about who we are and what makes us tick based on a mound of sound research.

Throughout the book Haidt uses an intriguing metaphor – the ‘elephant and the rider’ – making the case that we are not as rationally determined as we might like to think. Haidt argues that most of our functioning is governed by our instinctual, habituated and largely unconscious self (the elephant). Our rational conscious self is just like the rider on a elephant – allegedly in control but ultimately not … if our elephant wants to go a particular direction that is the way we go.

This has some interesting potential implications for change and personal development. If the elephant and the rider both want the same thing change is likely to be rapid and sustained. However if the two are at odds then change might be resisted or at best temporary. Think about all the times you (rider) have promised yourself (elephant) that you are going to get fitter/loose weight/cut back on red wine but failed to do so … that is the rider/elephant in action.

Some interesting implications for coaching … to be discussed!

Newbies and cynics

What a refreshing week – working with a brand new team who oozed ‘can do’ and ‘get up and go’. Not that they were a bunch of Polyanna’s – far from it – they were very clear about the size of the challenge they faced and the difficulties of making headway. But somehow this didn’t seem to daunt them, and despite the complexities of their labyrinthine organisation they were up for making a difference.

Will this group be as positive in a year’s time? I hope so but wouldn’t be surprised if it were otherwise. So often weariness, negativity and scepticism seems to creep in, and before you know it today’s enthusiastic newbie is tomorrow’s down trodden cynic. Perhaps its the path of least resistance – when you’ve hit your head on the organisational wall too many times cynicism starts to look like the sane response. However, given most of us spend most of our waking hours at work we owe it to ourselves to remember occasionally the difference we too once wanted to make in the world.

The too helpful leader

We’ve all heard of the ‘micro-manager’ – the guy/gal who is always hovering on your shoulder and deep down doesn’t really trust us to get on. However just as common, but less acknowledged, is the ‘too helpful manager’. These are the well-intentioned folk who can’t help taking other people’s problems on themselves, and define leadership in terms of the number of issues they’ve managed to fix in the day. Throw in a soupçon of control freakery and you’ve got a wonderful recipe for dis-empowerment.

For these managers coaching is often a struggle, as they see their role as the expert who has to provide all the answers. Coaching someone else to learn for themselves can therefore come as a bit of a shock, and more than the odd leading question is known to creep into the dialogue.

While of course problems must be fixed, the too helpful manager deprives their team of the opportunity to find their own way and make their own mistakes ie. grow and develop. Net result – the too helpful boss perpetually has to keep helping out and becomes a bottleneck on their own team performance.

Perhaps time for a redefinition of what is helpful?

Thanks to Jock McNeish for the wonderful cartoon.

Creating our own glass ceiling – issues in coaching

I’ve recently come back to an old favourite of mine – the ‘Let Go, Preserve, Add On’ model * and found myself having some interesting and useful leadership coaching conversations on the back of it. Arthur Freedman’s simple model suggests that the mix of skills, abilities, beliefs and knowledge (etc.) that got us to where we are today not only won’t get us further up the organisational ladder but actually might be holding us back – our own glass ceiling if you like. The trick is to know what we should ditch, what we should preserve and what we need to add into the mix. The problem is we tend to be comfortable with the repertoire that got us to today and the idea of shaking it up can feel scary .. particularly behaviours that have served us well in the past.

This was born out in a conversation I had with Martin last week. Martin is a promoted expert in his company and is struggling with the fact that he now being asked to lead experts instead of being one. “I just love the work” he confided in me, “…so much so that I’ve been know to repeat my team’s work just so I can feel connected again”. Worse still, he was struggling to value working strategically and was in danger of doing neither his new or old role well.

Freedman talks about a series of ‘crossroads’ that leaders must navigate as they move upward through the organisation. At each of these turning points, a fundamental reappraisal of our ‘leadership map’ is called for if we are not to be trapped by a glass ceiling of our own making.

*Freedman, A. (1998) , Pathways and Crossroads to Institutional Leadership, Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Vol. 50, No. 3,131-151 – click here for a copy

The ‘pink and fluffy’ stuff.

OK I’ve going to use the ‘F’ word – feelings – I know it is not fashionable but there you go I’ve done it now. While the value of emotional intelligence is not new news, what is it about the very hint of an emotion that make many of us head for the hills? Worse still, how come we have to deride ‘feelings’ as the ‘pink and fluffy’ stuff when often they are the most challenging part of our relationships … or is it because they are the most challenging part of our relationships?

Daniel Goleman reckons that all conversations – including hard headed business conversations – have an emotional content which we can choose to pay attention to, as well as a factual content. It could be as ‘in your face’ as fear, sadness or anger, or more subtle and lower key such as resentment, amusement or boredom. Whatever is present, all emotions have an impact whether we admit it or not and colours what becomes possible or impossible. When we ignore or suppress the feeling content of a situation we cut ourselves off from an important source of data about what is going on for both parties. I’ve often found in my coaching practice, for example, that the emotional content has been a more accurate predictor of intent rather than the sophisticated rationalisations and justifications we often show up with.

Here’s a link to Daniel Goleman talking (55 min) at the Google University about the productive use of the ‘pink and fluffy’ stuff and the emotional subtext of our conversations.

Have you forgotten your inspiration?

I met a client last week for coffee and I found myself recommending the work of Adam Kahane – an amazing facilitator who has worked on some really challenging issues (e.g. forming the new South Africa, drug cultures in South America, climate change etc) and written some of the most inspiring books I’ve read in a while.

I could wax lyrical about this man but what surprised me was that I had not thought about him for a while. Given this guy is a bit of a hero to me I found it a bit strange that I’d lost sight of his work and had to go and look him up all over again and get re-energised.

So I was wondering if anyone else out there has lost sight of any of their sources of inspiration and might need to reconnect to what has meaning and heart for them.

Here’s a link of Adam talking at the RSA (34 min) – hope he does it for you too! Happy Christmas!

Knowing what to do and wanting to do it – Alignment and Engagement

A while ago I had the pleasure of hearing John McLeod, co-author of the governmental report ‘ Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’. John had spent more than a year researching the link between organisational performance and employee engagement and … surprise, surprise the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour.

John feels that ‘engagement’ is a much misunderstood (and maligned) term. He believes that employees need to be both aligned – they know what to do, and engaged – they want to do it. Alignment without engagement results in ‘tin soldiers’ following the letter but not the spirit. Engagement without alignment results in ‘headless chickens’ enthusiastically rushing around but creating mayhem.

So… what are the people in your organisation like. Aligned andengaged or neither?

Here’s a link to the McLeod & Clarke report:

Managing change as managing anxiety

I’ve had a suspicion for a while that managing change in organisation is actually often about managing anxiety levels. Just watch your own heart rate go up in a meeting when ‘hot words’ like ‘redundancy’, ‘restructure or ‘pay freeze’ get bandied about.

Change by definition is a journey into the unknown – if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be change. And the unknown brings uncertainty and fear. I see too many managers who try to smooth these reactions away and rather than helping their people face into the future give unwarranted reassurances and are then surprised when nobody puts much energy into the change process. At the other extreme, I see leaders who have provoked so much anxiety that their organisation ceases to function effectively, and they are surprised to find copies of CV’s in the photocopier.

An aspect of managing change is therefore about provoking enough concern to propel people into engaging with change but avoiding the levels of anxiety that bring dysfunction. Getting the right balance of support andchallenge is tough to achieve and a dimension of change too few leaders seem clued into.

So… where is the balance of anxiety in your organisation – too much or too little?

Gathering dust? Development on the shelf.

I had a lovely piece of feedback today to the effect that I designed and ran development programmes where people actually applied their learning in their real worlds and experimented with changed behaviours.

Whilst not averse to a compliment, what struck me most about this comment was that it needed to be said at all. Surely we don’t run development programmes for the good of our health? What other walk of life would we invest our time, money and effort and not expect to get some sort of return or benefit. When did it become OK to go on development programme and leave the learning to gather dust on the proverbial shelf. While I get that there may be barriers to applying training messages (time, relevance etc) it does seem to have become normal not to expect much out of a course or that it somehow doesn’t apply to us personally – and hey presto we have a self-fulfilling prophecy in action. I also think – while I’m on the subject – that we training designers need to get way more creative and that the ritualised action planning session we habitually include in the last hour is just not enough to ensure application and transfer.

We spend literally billions worldwide on training and development – are we just wasting out time and money or have we (trainers and trainees alike) just forgotten how to take development seriously? OK rant over

Resistant Roger

I met Roger (not his real name) last week. I was facilitating an intensive workshop for a large group of very disgruntled managers. They had all been through the mill, bruised survivors of a protracted change process which had left them with roles and responsibilities they didn’t fully understand, and weren’t they wanted. Roger was typical – there was nothing anyone could say or do that would convince him the changes had been of any benefit – and he fully intended to carrying on working as he always had (thank you very much). The management team, increasingly frustrated with his intractability, were running out of ideas on how to convince him.

Rick Maurer (US change management consultant and public speaker) usefully talks about 3 types of resistance to change:

· Level 1 – “I don’t get it” . This is resistance borne out of just not understanding what the change is all about – the why? and the WIIFM.

· Level 2 – “I don’t like it” At this level people ‘get’ the change, but they just hate it.

· Level 3 – “I don’t trust you/ the organisation” At this level people respond not to the change per se but who is suggesting it

Roger’s case struck me as good example of how we can deal with resistance at the wrong level. Roger ‘got’ the change, he understood the logic for it. However, the change process has left him with a deep distrust of the organisation and its leadership. The more the management team pushed the logic of the change, the more he dug his heals in. What was needed was not more logic-based persuasion but a chance for Roger to reconnect with the organisation and repair relationships with his leaders and colleagues.

Here is Rick talking about his take on ‘resistance to change’

So.. what level of resistance are you meeting in the workplace. Are you tackling resistance at the right level?