Category: Personal Development

Looking down?

Bounding into the hotel this morning on my way to present to the Senior Executive Assistant Roundtable this morning the person walking towards me suddenly stopped, turned away and looked down, frantically texting. The person had been in a dispute I was involved in which, although settled a long time ago, had resulted in some silly stuff fired at my direction for a while after.

The women (yes all women) of the  Senior EA Roundtable were in good form. When you’re running a concurrent session you know people have a choice so it’s great when at least someone turns up! Actually we had lots turn up to hear about personal leadership and management.

We discovered that we all have different core values but there was quite a lot of commonality – family, integrity, freedom and honesty were a sample – and that it can be helpful to take into account someone else’s value when communicating with them. In fact it’s everything – treating others as they wish to be treated.

It just happened to be there in the paper – the pictures from the CCV camera of the woman stroking then dumping the cat into the wheelie bin  – and so we had a talk about that too. What sort of person would so such a thing!?  A cat hater? A psychopath? Maybe he did his business on the woman’s lawn? Whatever was the answer we learned that we can’t always anticipate why people do stuff unless we know about them. In the middle of the room, I suddenly completely and absolutely lost my train of thought. Mindfulness is such an important component of personal leadership – you know what it’s like when you’re in a meeting and someone is texting. Sometimes managers talk about this but Colleen today made it clear and present for me – it’s about respect. Yes that’s it, not hard at all.

And so we moved onto conflict – speaking to the other person’s values, commending, recommending and then commending. The group shared experiences and we heard some great examples of how to communicate powerfully.

As I type this there’s a young woman on the TV who drove drunk and killed the mother of the young man seated next to her.  He has forgiven her and they plan to give talks together. Two young people role modelling what grown ups in business struggle with.

Is your head held high? There’s no use putting your head down if there’s difficult stuff to do. Maybe you’re just not present or maybe you’re hiding. Either way if you interact with others you’ll need to be there. And when you’re there, do they know you? I told the group where my folks lived (you had to be there!), so I hope Mum and Dad don’t mind the occasional visitor! The greatest gift you can give.  Be present. Be yourself.

Defensive Force

Watching Seinfeld tonight Elaine was bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t seen as responsible enough to babysit a friend’s child. “Who wants to be responsible” responded Jerry Seinfeld “Whenever anything goes wrong the first thing they ask is who is responsible”.

It’s a question that has exercised the mind of the auditor general:  why did four Defence Force officers falsely claim allowances while on secondment to the UN. Listening to interviews on the radio on the way to my run this evening I heard “they’ve been disciplined”, “won’t happen again” and “they only claimed what they were entitled to remember” several times. What I didn’t hear was mention of culture and values that the auditor general had identified as underlying causes of the falsities.

At times of crisis, the leaders of any organisation will need to adopt a command and control leadership style, where directions are given and acted upon without question. The Defence business while on operations surely fits into this camp. But what about the rest of the time? Can the culture switch as required or is there just one culture?

We get glimpses of  an organisation’s culture through stuff that pops out externally – staff retention, how problems are dealt with, choices people make about where to work and statements from leaders are the sorts of things where we can pick up clues. So when its said that the culture and values caused the environment that gave rise to the false claims what culture are we talking about? Is this the culture that requires obedience to superior officers in all circumstances, even when illegal?

On the one hand you need to have officers able to unquestioningly respond to orders. But outside of operations you need to have a culture that allows questioning, coaching and responsibility for ones own actions. Sounds like a big challenge.

So when I listened to the radio tonight I heard all the things that one might expect with the organisation top-down rule book approach to “make things happen”.  “I will ensure that it doesn’t happen again”. That’s a fine aim, but you won’t if you don’t change the culture. And you won’t change the culture by doing treating the problem with the same culture that caused it. That dreadful defensiveness that uses rules and structures to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to explore the root causes that the auditor general identified.

So who is responsible? Is that even the right question? I believe that in leadership discovery we need to start with self. You won’t be acting without integrity and blind unquestioning if you’re authentic. But if your leadership paridigm is about finding new ways to control and strategise then you’re not even scratching the surface – you’re still on the command and control, but with fancy words.

Leadership discovery of authenticity. It’s the best defence against a culture that is not right, and the most sustainable way to embed real change.

That’s got a lot of force to it I reckon.

Stephen

Three times the energy

Last week I was asked “do you get it sometimes when you’re working that time seems to disappear and the work becomes effortless?”  I’m fortunate – this does happen to me – after all why would I be blogging on a Friday night?! A friend of mine in Christchurch and I have been talking recently about his career: “It doesn’t really matter what I do at work, in 50 years time someone will still be doing much the same, I’m not solving anything” he said.  Sounds like middle-aged purpose in life talk I said, let’s keep talking. And we did. A client said to me today “I have so much energy that I NEED to harness, if I don’t it will just go inside and defeat me”.

I liked that. Like the energy filled black star which has so much gravity, the light can’t escape. We can’t see a black hole and we can’t see the potential in someone who’s energy is turned inwards, when they have so much to offer. My colleague Jasbindar Singh has written about getting your grove back. Some people talk about their mojo.

As a leader what are you doing to harness the energy of those in your team? – allowing the passions to thrive and grow both the individual and the team and organisation. When it rains in the forest, it doesn’t matter where – everyone benefits (is that one metaphor too much for one blog!?), but I like the forest, and space, so you get them too.

What about yourself? Are you harnessing your energy to put you in that time-irrelevant space.  Three times I’ve been reminded of it in the last week. Three times the energy is what you’ll have if you do it. At least.

Stephen


Digg!

Are weaknesses back in fashion?

What we have here my friend are your strengths and over here, are what we call your “development opportunities”.  Does that sound like a Tui billboard to you? It’s starting to for me. Feedback surveys, personality profiles, our own development assessments all mention our development opportunities.  What they’re talking about of course are our weaknesses.

Strength-bases approaches to life have been around a while.  I’m reading Marcus Buckingham’s book Go put your strengths to work (actually I’m listening to the audio book in the car – please don’t interupt me Continue reading “Are weaknesses back in fashion?” →