Want to be a great leader? Be more popular

Welcome to my blog, one in a series looking at leadership characteristics. Here I draw on my own leadership experience and my work as an executive coach to share with you my thoughts on what makes for a great leader. This blog builds on my earlier blogs and in particular my last blog on LOVE. If you are short on time look at the lovely graphic  illustration from @engagevisually

Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Travelled starts with:

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

I would add to that “people are difficult”. Many of you know that as a leader you have to work at engaging your workforce and it will not be easy. You need to develop strategies and grow yourself to be an effective leader. My blogs help you consider and develop those skills.

So to add to the themes so far, being popular is an important skill to cultivate. Unless you run a business employing robots then you need to find a way to be more popular with staff. I have wondered about the balance between effectiveness, efficiency and popularity in leadership for a number of years now. I also know it is something those I coach often ponder as they lead teams and face business challenges.

At the beginning of my career a mentor told me to concentrate on being effective not popular. They suggested that if I wanted to be promoted I should not get involved with the staff and the detail of the organisation. I should try instead to remain focused on my/ my team’s targets and deliver the results. This was seen as particularly important if I wanted to be spotted by more senior managers and to progress in my career through the corporate hierarchy.

Surely, I thought if you want to deliver results they are delivered by teams, through others and with others. I think that we have got this wrong and we have in business schools swallowed the efficiency and strategic purpose mantra at the cost of staff engagement and organisational resilience.

To run an organisation effectively you need the motivation and engagement of ALL your staff and most importantly the contribution of their skills and their will. I started to realise that what was needed was a way to engage the discretionary effort of the workforce. That discretionary effort is like fairy dust and when engaged can increase individuals effectiveness dramatically.  Staff have to WANT to work with you and if you are a leader then they must WANT TO follow you. Not just follow you in the good times but TRUST YOU to lead them in their/the company’s best interest in tough times also. You cannot be effective and will never be effective in leading change and transforming the business without the will of the staff to work with you.  They have to like you enough and so you have to be more popular with them.

Now popular is an interesting word and I don’t mean the sort of popular leader who will not upset the status quo. Nor do I visualise a leader who does not really drive change and definitely not the leader who is nice but is seen by staff as ineffective. We need instead to be popular on a deeper level and this will lead to engaged staff, effectiveness as a leader and success for the business. Popular and efficiency do not have to sit as opposites as they actually balance the best leaders.

So, I am intrigued by the word popular and its root is in the Latin word popularis.  Two definitions of the word jump out at me and they are:

“Being regarded with favour, affection or approval by people in general” and

“Relating to or representing the common people”.

Many of us are not in favour with our staff as GALLUP analysis of US Employee Engagement suggests less than a third of workers in Washington DC are engaged in their jobs. Leaders need to make a difference here as I think we have a leadership popularity crisis that is leading to poor staff engagement.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx

I saw some graffiti recently which I thought summed this problem in business up:

“You pretend to give us satisfying work and pretend to pay us a proper wage and so we turn up and pretend to work for you.”

We know what staff want to be effective at work and it’s not more money. Instead they want autonomy – to be left alone to do a good job, they also want mastery thats the skills and support to do that job. They also want a sense of purpose, I would describe this as hope. And you as leaders can help them with all three of these areas. They want great leaders and they tell us they would rather have no leader than a poor one!

DDI did a fabulous and comprehensive study of what employees think of us as leaders and it is not comfortable reading. They think we are so busy trying to be effective and running efficient organisations that we don’t notice them and do not lead them well. So if you want to be effective and efficient then start thinking about being more popular with the aim to engage your staff. You can practise and learn some of these skills and this can start by just understanding what the impact of your current behaviour is having:

https://www.ddiworld.com/DDIWorld/media/trend-research/lessonsforleadersfromthepeoplewhomatter_mis_ddi.pdf

If you want to work actively at being more popular cast you mind across your organisation, your people and yourself and the leaders you work with and start to ask some questions:.

• Do your staff regard you and your fellow leaders with affection and approval?
• Would staff say you relate well to them?
• Are you seen as “of the common people” and do you know what interests them?
• Who has had a marriage, a baby, kids go to college, anniversary lately? did you notice it? did you acknowledge it?
• Do you survey your staff on what their aims and goals are for the next year or five years are in work and in life?
• Are your business goals aligned to the staff goals for work and life?
• When you go walk about do you ask staff what are their thoughts on how the business is doing?
• Do you ask them for ideas on how to improve things?
• Do staff tell you they know what’s expected of them from you and their manager?
• Do you reward effort as well as results for the company?

Now spend some time listening to what you hear and reflecting on what it says to you. Be honest and challenge yourself as you ponder the questions above. You will need a great coach to help you sift what you are hearing and to think about what you will do with the data this exercise provides you as a leader.

I can promise you efficiency without the people will fail. I have failed myself when I was in an organisation that caused me to put efficiency and targets above taking people with me. When the organisation hit hard times I was not popular enough to survive the cut backs.  I learnt a lesson that a key skill of a leader alongside developing the business strategy is to facilitate cooperation. People NEED to want to be around you.

I think the avoidance of popularity is particularly problematic in women who seek leadership roles. They may fear their feminine side, often seen as “the soft skills”. But these skills are so valuable in leadership as staff like REAL and POPULAR leaders. Though I am a passionate advocate for gender equality in the boardroom I am a realist when it comes to women still being judged harder than men if they appear too ruthless.

There will be many leaders in your organisation and they do not just operate in or around the boardroom. So why not give them a chance to do this development work also. John Quincy Adams said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

And if you need one more reason to work on and develop the skills of being more popular it is to balance your own ego as a leader. You don’t want to end up like Aesop’s wolf do you?

A Wolf, who was roaming about on the plain when the sun was getting low in the sky, was much impressed by the size of his shadow, and said to himself, “I had no idea I was so big. Fancy my being afraid of a lion! Why, I, not he, ought to be King of the beasts”; and, heedless of danger, he strutted about as if there could be no doubt at all about it. Just then a lion sprang upon him. “Alas,” he cried, “had I not lost sight of the facts, I shouldn’t have been ruined by my fancies.”

Do contact me for executive coaching, mentoring and leadership speaking. I can travel to you or I offer high quality Skype coaching. I might be able to help you become more popular and I would love to work with you on your leadership journey.

http://www.amandareynolds.org

Can you learn to be a great Leader? – try GRATITUDE

Welcome to my blog, I plan to write 12 blogs in a new series looking at leadership characteristics. I will draw on my own leadership experience along with observations taken from my executive coaching and mentoring practise. My blogs will be focused and to the point so, do read on as I will help you think differently about leadership and how to approach your work.

But if you are short on time try this visual

There will be problems and this week is likely to present you as a leader, or someone others call a leader with many new challenges. Maybe your teams are not performing, targets missed, your customers or buyers are unhappy and your budgets are overrunning. So, you know what you need to do – be tough minded, make difficult decisions, avoid distraction and focus on the immediate tasks. Or is that the right strategy here? What if instead of being tough minded and focused, firing off directives from the executive floor you went out and around your organisation saying thanks to people? What if at the end of each day you wrote down what you were thankful for in your day and also write down who you had said thanks to. That’s crazy, you don’t have time for that. You have to lead from the front and face problems head on. Its tough so staff need to see you modelling tough don’t they? They don’t need the ceo out bothering and distracting them. And, you have back to back meets all day and you will struggle to find time for lunch let alone have anything much to feel positive about. But, what if I told you research shows gratitude works as an effective leadership intervention. It will help build your presence and will help you specifically over time by; Changing your perspective – once you start to practise gratitude your mind will focus on the positives and the possibilities in situations. It stops you becoming inward looking obsessed with problems and instead your mind starts to clear as you develop a focus on others. Energy –You will start to lead with more energy and commitment as you turn setbacks and challenges into opportunities. You will find creativity to deal with the challenges you and your organisation face, because you are outward focused. Resilience -You will become stronger with greater psychological reserves as you start to build personal and inter personal resilience. I’m not talking unrealistic over optimism but a different perspective on your challenges and problems. You will draw your team around you as they feel valued and attended to by you. So it’s not about you being tough, it’s about a strong team. Getting it back- Leadership is often talked about as a lonely place. No one speaks truth to power and no one walks the journey with you. But gratitude draws others in as when they start to experience you showing genuine gratitude they will offer it back to you. It’s not about you –You will start to see your staff as your greatest asset. You will start to see the person behind the title and start to feel a genuine rapport with those who can engage with gratitude. You will stop feeling you have to solve the problems and instead engage the organisation and its people. Challenges move -It will at times seem almost miraculous when challenges get solved because people collaborate with you with focused and clear minds. They start to know their efforts get noticed so they work harder. Morale will improve – The morale of your workforce will improve as they feel valued. They will focus more clearly on the task as they are not held back by negatively. You will unlock all that discretionary effort that is currently taken up in resisting change or fighting the system. You will become more self-aware – many leaders become isolated, self-absorbed and have a different view of themselves to their staff, their team and their organisations. They get lost in the job of leadership and take reinforcement from the status and the power. Now gratitude given and received starts to slowly open you up to genuine feedback, to noticing others and they then notice when you make a difference. You will be surprised by what others see as important in the leader. You will start to integrate your life – evidence suggests most leaders only talk to other leaders. People who are just like them but it takes a whole organisation to deliver the business so you need ways to engage with all those not like you. If you are a Myers Briggs ENTJ leader you are just 4% of the world. So, what do all those others think!! You will start to find yourself more at ease talking to the PA, the post room staff, your own partner and kids and break into fabulous spontaneous conversations when the train is delayed. You will become a leader who has followers – A CEO can get on a soap box, meet teams, sign off strategic plans but they only become real leaders when they have followers. So, how do you start? Start small, start private and start genuine. Get a notebook keep it by your bed or in your work bag. Write down each day no more than five things you are grateful for. Even on a terrible day when the trains late, a key buyer pulls out or your team misses monthly performance by a barn mile you still had a great cup of coffee. So, write it down. Be genuine, don’t shout about it and don’t kid yourself with big statements. If you are a real leader you are deep in the muck and bullets so a great coffee or a train home that ran to time today might be the best you can do. But, start there it will get better and bigger if you do this genuinely and for at least a month. Once you have got the hang of the GRATITUDE LIST then start a second list; Think of the people you said thanks to today, the bus driver, your PA for that great cup of coffee. The cab driver or your deputy who pulled off the deal for the team.  Notice this list, you might struggle to even put one thank you down at first. You may notice you are rubbish at saying well done or thank you but better at barking orders. So leave it blank and tomorrow commit to say one thank you to anyone, to someone, and mean it. Keep these two lists for a month then review yourself against the characteristics I listed above. Notice how the lists changed and developed, what have you learnt about yourself and notice how you feel about yourself, your family, your work. I’m certain you will do better on authenticity, self-awareness and resilience. You may also have more energy, better staff morale and business success…. Staying with gratitude let’s finish with a story from Aesop… A Slave ran away from his master, by whom he had been most cruelly treated, and, in order to avoid capture, betook himself into the desert. As he wandered about in search of food and shelter, he came to a cave, which he entered and found to be unoccupied. Really, however, it was a Lion’s den, and almost immediately, to the horror of the wretched fugitive, the Lion himself appeared. The man gave himself up for lost: but, to his utter astonishment, the Lion, instead of springing upon him and devouring him, came and fawned upon him, at the same time whining and lifting up his paw. Observing it to be much swollen and inflamed, he examined it and found a large thorn embedded in the ball of the foot. He accordingly removed it and dressed the wound as well as he could: and in course of time it healed up completely. The Lion’s gratitude was unbounded; he looked upon the man as his friend, and they shared the cave for some time together. A day came, however, when the Slave began to long for the society of his fellow-men, and he bade farewell to the Lion and returned to the town. Here he was presently recognised and carried off in chains to his former master, who resolved to make an example of him, and ordered that he should be thrown to the beasts at the next public spectacle in the theatre. On the fatal day the beasts were loosed into the arena, and among the rest a Lion of huge bulk and ferocious aspect; and then the wretched Slave was cast in among them. What was the amazement of the spectators, when the Lion after one glance bounded up to him and lay down at his feet with every expression of affection and delight! It was his old friend of the cave! The audience clamoured that the Slave’s life should be spared: and the governor of the town, marvelling at such gratitude and fidelity in a beast, decreed that both should receive their liberty. We never know when gratitude will be returned so go on start it today. If you like my approach then do contact me to talk to you as a leader or to your team. I love and learn from feedback so do tell me what you think of the blog………

pictorial view of the blog thanks to @engagevisually

www.amandareynolds.org

Want to be a great leader? then grow some Resilience

Welcome to my blog, one in a series exploring leadership characteristics. Here I draw on my own leadership experience and my work as an executive coach to share with you my thoughts on what makes for a great leader. I consider there are a number of leadership characteristics a leader needs to display and work on to be more than average.  I want in this blog to focus on the theme of resilience in leaders and leadership teams. I have developed this blog from a speech I gave to young women at the Norwich High school for Girls. Strengthening resilience is important at any age and in any area of responsibility.

In my work as a leadership coach I spend most of my time with women and men in their thirties, forties and fifties who are at the top of organisations. They often struggle as leaders with bad habits they have learnt over the years and ways of thinking that don’t help them to be effective at work or in life.  I am not promising any magic solutions but I will share with you some of the learning and research that can help you on the road to being more resilient.

I like to think of what Gandhi said when I work as a coach “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”

 So why do we need to remake ourselves or grow resilience? Well in essence because life is about facing new and often relentless change and challenge.  The paradox is that as we get more successful and take on more senior roles the challenges get more complex and require more of our own self to deal with them.

You know what I mean, at the end of the day you get home and get asked how you feel, “I feel rung out”, “the day took everything from me”, “I can’t begin to tell you the nightmare of what we are dealing with.” Then secretly in the dead of night, with just your own thoughts you might say “I have no idea how to do this” or “I’m going to fail.” Your heart races and then all too soon its 6am the alarm goes off and out into the world of work you go again. But have you rested? Have you recovered?  Are you stronger? Are you resilient enough? Welcome to the world of the leader and you are not going to quit but how do you keep going?

This is where you need resilience and you need to grow it and keep growing it.  If not, you will burn out. We don’t like to talk about being burnt out but I see it too often in the corridors of power: “Maybe if I had not been so stressed on the weekend or worked so hard I could have saved my marriage, had better health, drunk less.”

Now, I can’t save your marriage but I can give you some hints to how you can be stronger and more able to cope with pressure and that might help your marriage…or it might not. BUT if you focus on growing resilience you will be a stronger person or as I like to say “the best version of yourself”.

What is resilience? I like this quote from Hara Estroff Marano, Editor-at-Large for Psychology Today, wrote in her article “The Art of Resilience”:

“At the heart of resilience is a belief in oneself—yet also a belief in something larger than oneself. Resilient people do not let adversity define them. They find resilience by moving towards a goal beyond themselves, transcending pain and grief by perceiving bad times as a temporary state of affairs. It’s possible to strengthen your inner self and your belief in yourself, to define yourself as capable and competent. It’s possible to fortify your psyche. It’s possible to develop a sense of mastery.”

I can guess what you might be thinking now as it’s the prevailing thought that we have had for many years in the West. You think some people are born happier, some more sad and then life happens to us. These life experiences can help us be happy and sometimes our life experience can bring us down. Some people are just luckier in life than others, aren’t they?

All of this has some truth as a baseline but those patterns are not fixed and we can all learn happiness and strategies that make us more fulfilled in life. That’s great news isn’t it? We are not stuck where we are, with what we have been born with, we can take control and we can make a difference to our level of happiness. As Gandhi suggested we can REMAKE OURSELF. Also there is something uncanny in struggle as it can often make you stronger.

I believe with the right mindset we can all achieve a great deal more as individuals and as leaders and make a real difference to our customers and staff. BUT like athletes before they enter the Olympics you must train your resilience levels NOT just concentrate on doing the job or learning the technical skills as you lead in organisations.  I can’t tell you in this blog post everything about emotional resilience and we will just touch the tip of the iceberg. But I want to give you a framework you can work on and practise. It will require practise as resilience is a work in progress and there are no short cuts here.

My life also has had some great highs and lows. I had a difficult start in life and was made homeless at 17. It’s not how anyone would choose to start adult life is it? But I learnt some lessons that I have carried into life:

1. You can always start again
2. Take responsibility for your own growth
3. Surround yourself with good people who believe in you

Some pretty famous women have faced much greater real life difficulties at the start of their life and overcame them and became a huge success in their field. Like Rhianna – alcoholic and abusive father she says at 13 music saved her, Charlize Theron another abusive father and she witnessed her mother shoot him dead as he attacked them when she was 15.

They remind me you can start again, you can overcome difficulties and you can become stronger.  Your adult life too can throw you a curve ball. We can think of J K Rowling, a rejected single parent and grindingly poor on welfare. Now a billionaire and Sheryl Sandburg, a Silicon Valley CEO (and so was her husband) then he fell off a running machine two years ago and died leaving her alone with young kids.

That’s essentially the myth isn’t it?  We look at people on the outside and they seem successful, they seem to have it all. We think that to have a successful life it should be easy, we should just sail through life and everything we reach for falls into our grasp. We all want to protect ourselves, to be wrapped up in a safe box filled with cotton wool. Our friends and families want that too and to give us a great life free from difficulties. But comfort does not make us strong. Testing times and how we learn from them are often what enable us to grow.

So how might I know I’m not resilient enough? The second myth I want to bust is that resilience is about being tough. Those tough bosses definitely generate the need for resilience in their staff BUT it’s not toughness I’m looking at here. I think that the tough boss personality is nearer a psychopath than a healthy human being. Reacting is basic survival or the fight or flight instinct. The need to work on your resilience shows that you are human and the more you work on your resilience the more you will also positively impact your workplace climate and that encourages others to talk about and work on their resilience too. That’s the third myth showing you are working on resilience is a weakness. The opposite is true as it strengthens you and for those around you.  But, of course its threatening for those living under the veneer of tough isn’t it?

So, resilient people do react to stress and pressure and it’s their ability to bounce back that sets them apart. A healthy amount of resilience is a sign of good mental health. The next myth is the corporate culture one of lean in, take on more, try harder and work longer. The research shows you are more likely to be resilient by developing strategies OUTSIDE of work than you are by trying to be stronger IN work.

Growing resilience is strange and exciting and we can see the effect of it now on MRIs. As the MRI will show in real time how we react in the moment to situations. The work by Richard J Davidson & Sharon Begley from their book and research in “The Emotional Life of your Brain” demonstrates this beautifully. They show how its incremental, that our resilience to the small blips is a great predictor of our resilience to the big stuff. So the phrase “don’t sweat the small stuff” really is quite profound in the field of resilience study.

Maybe their book should be called “the brain bounces back” rather than the emotional life of your brain. Because that’s what we are after here, the ability to bounce back from setbacks. So, like any muscle it’s about the recovery time of your brain that shows your resilience.

Try and think about a difficult situation recently and think about how it made you feel both at the time and after.  Not just a big event like a death or a divorce but a car pushing in front of you, the boiler breaking down so you could not have a hot shower or being really late for an important meeting because the train was delayed.  Remember how we react to small stuff is as important to be aware of as the big stuff.

Some of these signs might be familiar:

Physical responses can include:

Tiredness, headaches, ‘butterflies’ in the stomach, indigestion and nausea, neck ache, heartburn, allergies, skin problems, shallow breathing, blurred vision, aching muscles or palpitations.

Mental responses can mean you may:

Be more indecisive, find it hard to concentrate, become forgetful, have feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem.

Emotional responses can mean you are likely to:

Get irritable or angry, be fearful, feel numb, get embarrassed, be hypersensitive, get tearful, or feel drained and listless.

Behavioural responses can mean you may:

Find it hard to sleep, change your eating habits, focus too much on work, smoke or drink more, avoid friends and family or experience relationship problems.

Now ask yourself honestly “how long did I take to get over that situation.”

So, what does a resilient person appear like then? well they are more likely to demonstrate the following traits:

• They know their boundaries
• They keep good company
• They cultivate self-awareness
• They practice acceptance
• They are willing to sit in silence
• They don’t have all the answers
• They have a menu of self-care habits
• They enlist their team
• They consider the possibilities
• They get out of their head

Now take a minute to reflect and ask yourself:

How did I do thinking about a situation that didn’t go well for me?

How do I react to pressure or difficulties what does my body tell me?

How do I think I do on the traits of resilient people?

Now take a deep breath and whatever you feel like you are doing in terms of being resilient right now don’t worry, you can always get better. Don’t beat yourself up and instead use these insights to set goals to improve. Resilient people have SELF CARE HABITS looking at the research and best practice available I have devised what I call an Emotional Buoyancy Plan or my list of self-care habits.

I suggest you try and populate each one of them. On your own is fine but it’s a great tool to use with your coach or do it with a partner, friend or teenagers (make sure it’s someone who will take it seriously and give you honest feedback though!)

Ask yourself in which of these categories am I already good? what happens when I don’t practice that habit? sleeping enough for example and which things do I never do?

The aim is to think about what can I do more of? and where do I need to start something in the area you know you are not working on yet.

MY BUOYANCY PLAN

I can thrive if I remember to practice these things:

I will TALK about how I feel	I will BUILD healthy friendships
I will LOOK AFTER my physical health	I will love SLEEP & EAT WELL
I will practise being GRATEFUL	I will practise my FAITH or MINDFULNESS
I will do something just for the LOVE	I will BE CURIOUS & learn something new
I will GIVE MYSELF TIME TO RELAX	I will GET TO KNOW my moods & triggers
I will be KIND by learning to like myself	I will SAY NO to stuff or people that do not help my well being

If you want to think more about gratitude or curiosity I have written blogs on these areas and you will find summaries on my website. If you struggle with the other areas these are rich topics to work on with a coach, they can help you develop strategies to improve in these areas.

If you would like to talk to me directly about supporting you as a coach or speaking as a key note or workshop facilitator, then do get in touch.

www.blendassociates.org

Finally, Sheryl Sandburg speaking after husband’s early death “What I want to talk about today is what you do next. About the things you can do to overcome adversity no matter when it hits you or how it hits. The easy days ahead of you will be easy. It’s the hard days — the days that challenge you to your very core — that will determine who you are. You will be defined not just by what you achieve, but how you survive.  You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience It’s a muscle. You can build it up and then draw on it when you need it. And in that process, you figure out who you really are. And you just might become the very best version of yourself.”

 

 

 

Want to be a great leader? Be more popular

Welcome to my blog, one in a series looking at leadership characteristics. Here I draw on my own leadership experience and my work as an executive coach to share with you my thoughts on what makes for a great leader. This blog builds on my earlier blogs and in particular my last blog on LOVE. If you are short on time look at the lovely graphic  illustration from @engagevisually

Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Travelled starts with:

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

I would add to that “people are difficult”. Many of you know that as a leader you have to work at engaging your workforce and it will not be easy. You need to develop strategies and grow yourself to be an effective leader. My blogs help you consider and develop those skills.

So to add to the themes so far, being popular is an important skill to cultivate. Unless you run a business employing robots then you need to find a way to be more popular with staff. I have wondered about the balance between effectiveness, efficiency and popularity in leadership for a number of years now. I also know it is something those I coach often ponder as they lead teams and face business challenges.

At the beginning of my career a mentor told me to concentrate on being effective not popular. They suggested that if I wanted to be promoted I should not get involved with the staff and the detail of the organisation. I should try instead to remain focused on my/ my team’s targets and deliver the results. This was seen as particularly important if I wanted to be spotted by more senior managers and to progress in my career through the corporate hierarchy.

Surely, I thought if you want to deliver results they are delivered by teams, through others and with others. I think that we have got this wrong and we have in business schools swallowed the efficiency and strategic purpose mantra at the cost of staff engagement and organisational resilience.

To run an organisation effectively you need the motivation and engagement of ALL your staff and most importantly the contribution of their skills and their will. I started to realise that what was needed was a way to engage the discretionary effort of the workforce. That discretionary effort is like fairy dust and when engaged can increase individuals effectiveness dramatically.  Staff have to WANT to work with you and if you are a leader then they must WANT TO follow you. Not just follow you in the good times but TRUST YOU to lead them in their/the company’s best interest in tough times also. You cannot be effective and will never be effective in leading change and transforming the business without the will of the staff to work with you.  They have to like you enough and so you have to be more popular with them.

Now popular is an interesting word and I don’t mean the sort of popular leader who will not upset the status quo. Nor do I visualise a leader who does not really drive change and definitely not the leader who is nice but is seen by staff as ineffective. We need instead to be popular on a deeper level and this will lead to engaged staff, effectiveness as a leader and success for the business. Popular and efficiency do not have to sit as opposites as they actually balance the best leaders.

So, I am intrigued by the word popular and its root is in the Latin word popularis.  Two definitions of the word jump out at me and they are:

“Being regarded with favour, affection or approval by people in general” and

“Relating to or representing the common people”.

Many of us are not in favour with our staff as GALLUP analysis of US Employee Engagement suggests less than a third of workers in Washington DC are engaged in their jobs. Leaders need to make a difference here as I think we have a leadership popularity crisis that is leading to poor staff engagement.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx

I saw some graffiti recently which I thought summed this problem in business up:

“You pretend to give us satisfying work and pretend to pay us a proper wage and so we turn up and pretend to work for you.”

We know what staff want to be effective at work and it’s not more money. Instead they want autonomy – to be left alone to do a good job, they also want mastery thats the skills and support to do that job. They also want a sense of purpose, I would describe this as hope. And you as leaders can help them with all three of these areas. They want great leaders and they tell us they would rather have no leader than a poor one!

DDI did a fabulous and comprehensive study of what employees think of us as leaders and it is not comfortable reading. They think we are so busy trying to be effective and running efficient organisations that we don’t notice them and do not lead them well. So if you want to be effective and efficient then start thinking about being more popular with the aim to engage your staff. You can practise and learn some of these skills and this can start by just understanding what the impact of your current behaviour is having:

https://www.ddiworld.com/DDIWorld/media/trend-research/lessonsforleadersfromthepeoplewhomatter_mis_ddi.pdf

If you want to work actively at being more popular cast you mind across your organisation, your people and yourself and the leaders you work with and start to ask some questions:.

• Do your staff regard you and your fellow leaders with affection and approval?
• Would staff say you relate well to them?
• Are you seen as “of the common people” and do you know what interests them?
• Who has had a marriage, a baby, kids go to college, anniversary lately? did you notice it? did you acknowledge it?
• Do you survey your staff on what their aims and goals are for the next year or five years are in work and in life?
• Are your business goals aligned to the staff goals for work and life?
• When you go walk about do you ask staff what are their thoughts on how the business is doing?
• Do you ask them for ideas on how to improve things?
• Do staff tell you they know what’s expected of them from you and their manager?
• Do you reward effort as well as results for the company?

Now spend some time listening to what you hear and reflecting on what it says to you. Be honest and challenge yourself as you ponder the questions above. You will need a great coach to help you sift what you are hearing and to think about what you will do with the data this exercise provides you as a leader.

I can promise you efficiency without the people will fail. I have failed myself when I was in an organisation that caused me to put efficiency and targets above taking people with me. When the organisation hit hard times I was not popular enough to survive the cut backs.  I learnt a lesson that a key skill of a leader alongside developing the business strategy is to facilitate cooperation. People NEED to want to be around you.

I think the avoidance of popularity is particularly problematic in women who seek leadership roles. They may fear their feminine side, often seen as “the soft skills”. But these skills are so valuable in leadership as staff like REAL and POPULAR leaders. Though I am a passionate advocate for gender equality in the boardroom I am a realist when it comes to women still being judged harder than men if they appear too ruthless.

There will be many leaders in your organisation and they do not just operate in or around the boardroom. So why not give them a chance to do this development work also. John Quincy Adams said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

And if you need one more reason to work on and develop the skills of being more popular it is to balance your own ego as a leader. You don’t want to end up like Aesop’s wolf do you?

A Wolf, who was roaming about on the plain when the sun was getting low in the sky, was much impressed by the size of his shadow, and said to himself, “I had no idea I was so big. Fancy my being afraid of a lion! Why, I, not he, ought to be King of the beasts”; and, heedless of danger, he strutted about as if there could be no doubt at all about it. Just then a lion sprang upon him. “Alas,” he cried, “had I not lost sight of the facts, I shouldn’t have been ruined by my fancies.”

Do contact me for executive coaching, mentoring and leadership speaking. I can travel to you or I offer high quality Skype coaching. I might be able to help you become more popular and I would love to work with you on your leadership journey.

http://www.amandareynolds.org

BITESIZE LOVE

 

Welcome to my bite size. One of 12 blogs in a new series looking at leadership characteristics.

I want in this blog to focus on the theme of LOVE.

 

I’m sure that you didn’t learn Love in Business School and we never talk love in the boardroom.  But, I think we need LOVE in business as we need to love our products, our customers and to love our staff.  If you are in a business or a team you don’t love I think it shows. If we look around at the businesses who are successful, especially the great entrepreneurs. We see that they love their products and they want to share that love with the world. They love their customers and they get a huge sense of satisfaction with the customer’s pleasure and positive experience. This sort of business leadership is rare.

Deloittes 2015 HR survey suggested culture, employee engagement and retention is now the most pressing challenge for business. http://d2mtr37y39tpbu.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/DUP_GlobalHumanCapitalTrends2015.pdf

So, throw LOVE into your next team meeting with a couple of questions.:

1. Tell me about the risks and challenges we currently face?
2. What or who do you each love and how does that make you feel?
3. Think about our business and tell me who or what do you love about this place?
4. Think about our products and would our customers say they love them and why?

I tell you, the reactions will astound you, we are desperate to love, we look for love and we are brought alive by love. The opposite of fear is love and the ancient Greeks had 30 words to describe love.

If you remember the movie Jerry Maguire you will remember the character played by Tom Cruise. Jerry loved work with a passion, he loved his business that’s why he wrote that mission statement, that is ultimately why he got sacked. No one else could get it, engage with it or pull down the façade of business and professionalism they had created. So, they thought Jerry was crazy. Jerry shared the love he had for his only player:

“I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU.”

But, for most of the movie Jerry never brought that out in the open into his leading or the way he led. He talked under pressure, in a wash room and angry about never fully telling it. Are you that leader? The one who loves? The one who wells up when a customer tells you how a product disappointed them or how brilliant it was? The one who loves but can’t share it?

If we focus on how we can experience and grow love in an organisation rather than leading by fear and control how would that change us and those we work with? I think we need to imagine our customers as our family and friends. What would our business be like if we loved our customers and our staff like we love our friends, our family or ours sports team? Making it good enough for your mum, sticking with them, going the extra mile, getting it right for them and staying with it.

Unfortunately we are too familiar with leaders who are self-serving, egotistical or narcissistic. We cannot change these corporate issues overnight but we need to think about a different approach.

Try a poster on your wall: if this business were loving its customers what would it be doing?

Remember this is a journey, a mind set shift and you can’t do this overnight. Get a coach yourself and a facilitator for your team to discuss this and start to think about having these conversations with staff.

Let’s finish with The Velveteen Rabbit :

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.’

Do contact me for executive coaching face to face or SKYPE, mentoring and leadership speaking.

Mum: An ordinary death in extraordinary place

On 16.12.15 at 10 am my mum died. She was only 73 and had suffered a cruel and fast cancer. I and my stepdad were with her when she passed. People tell me that will be solace for us in the end, maybe.

Mum had been a fighter all her life and we didn’t always see eye to eye. Two flints sparking off each other someone once said! But like a flint makes fire and fire is energy my mum would approach everything in life as an overcomer. In October she called by my house and told me her diagnosis. She told me it would be quick and she said “this was it”. I said mum you will fight this and she replied “no I can’t”. I think she began to die right there, under the weight of the diagnosis and when she decided that cancer would win.

My husband said that she needed strength from me. So, in the next month’s I tried many times to share my energy with her to see it dissipate when it passed over. So, I focused energy into my administrator mode. Talking to senior staff when admitted to hospital in an emergency, getting her the care she needed at home and ensuring the palliative care team knew her end of life wishes. Mum and I meanwhile planned Christmas at my house and we discussed what we would order and how I would take care of it all this year.

Just over a week ago she was booked into respite care to give dad a break from caring for a few nights. Mum was alert and active and in fact full of too much energy. I know now this was the cancer rampaging through her.  On 10.12.15 she went into a fabulous respite unit run by http://www.ageuk.org.uk  and never came home.

I rang her on the 10^th and 11^th and she was actively getting involved in activities and settling well. Meanwhile Dad was getting some great sleep.I relaxed a little thinking a break was what they both needed. I visited her on the Saturday morning early and she was in bed. I asked when she was getting up and she said she wasn’t. I joked “you are having an off day mum let’s get you up later”. She didn’t get out of that bed again until she left for the Chapel of Rest on the Wednesday afternoon.  Mum had great care from the professionals and a quick and peaceful passing but that’s not the story here.

The story I need to tell is about a team of unqualified staff with no experience of palliative care amongst them. They were working in a respite unit that was not set up for death but they decided to give my mum a good death.  On Monday social services planned to move her to a nursing home. Mum had already by then overstayed in respite two days and was too frail to go home. They found a home but it had just failed its inspection! I was ready for the fight mum would expect me to have for her. I spent Monday evening identifying the nursing homes skilled in palliative care who each had a bed and got ready to discuss this with the professionals.

I went into the home early Tuesday morning to meet the manager. I said I was not happy with the home being offered to mum, she said nor was she. She had discussed it with the team and they would like to care for mum until the end. I questioned if they were able to provide palliative care. She stated she would ask, actually she said “tell” her manager this was the teams wish. They would get the expert help they needed from the palliative care team, community matron and GP but they would lead her care.

Calmly, confidently and proactively they cared for mum as the family took shifts in sitting with her. Mum deteriorated very quickly and as she did the staff care and attention was increased. She died with her soft skin still intact, not a blemish or break in sight and cared for like I would expect from qualified palliative care staff.

What did these staff teach me?

• It’s about patient centred caring, doing what the patient needs, when they need it.
• It’s about paying attention to the family so they feel supported.
• It’s about giving a good, dignified and respectful end.

When mum died a care assistant was with us in the room. Later she and I had a hug, a cry and cup of tea. I thanked her for her care with mum. She said they all wanted to do it but were anxious they were not qualified. I said you are qualified in care and did everything mum needed.

I asked her if she had always been a carer? Same age as me, from the same school but she said she messed up at school that’s why she was a carer. I asked her what she would have done if school had been different. “I would have been a palliative care nurse” she immediately replied. I assured her today she had been a great palliative care nurse and she still had time to go qualify if she wanted to.

I’m not dismissing the value of the qualified professional but in life and death it is those that care – certificates or not that make the biggest difference. When you encounter real care its tangible – you can almost feel it in the air.

So, this Christmas when you think of all the nurses, doctors and social workers working Christmas think also of the army of care staff also. They might just be giving someone a great ending like those extraordinary people in an extraordinary place who made mums death a good one for us all.

William Blake: On Another’s Sorrow

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear —

And not sit beside the next,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant’s tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give his joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

Oh He gives to us his joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled an gone
He doth sit by us and moan

 

BITESIZE FAILURE

Welcome to my bite size. One of 12 blogs in a new series looking at leadership characteristics. Here I explore the experience and learning from failure. We don’t like to talk about failure.  Leaders can’t be allowed to fail, can they?  we wonder will it be me next? how do I avoid failure? You need to change your mindset to expect and learn from failure.

Take Walt Disney, failure after failure but that’s not the story we remember is it?  His first animation company had to dissolve it as distributors didn’t pay him.  Universal took his cartoon rabbit and claimed ownership!  MGM told him Mickey Mouse would terrify women. Pinocchio production was shut down due to spiralling costs. When he did premiere it, his publicity was a disaster as the 11 people he hired got drunk and ran around New York!  He experienced failure upon failure, but he learnt from his failures.

So why do leaders fail? In  “Lead like it matters because it does” Roxi Hewertson, CEO of Highland Consulting Group and AskRoxi.com lists five reasons why leaders fail: Over or under confidence – Approaching leadership with the wrong expectations –Lack of training in the skills of the leader – Ignoring the need for a healthy team – Failure to listen.

If we are truly leading and reaching beyond safe and mediocre we will fail, we will sometimes push too hard.  We may be in a culture that does not fit us well, not take people with us and not get the change happening. You might be failed by the business context. You may have a vision and values not aligned or we might have an innovation or idea ahead of its time.

Do not run away from your failure instead let the failures be your teacher.  Ask yourself, with the support of your coach: Where did I fail? Were the examples above speaking to me? Were there signs of impending failure that I missed? Were people trying to warn me and did I not listen? What have I learnt? How did this failure impact my values?  What can I do next time? How can I turn this lesson into a success in the future?

Then encourage yourself to try again. Surround yourself with “life enrichers” who will help you to rebuild and move forward. Walt Disney said: “There are three kinds of people in the world today,” “There are ‘well poisoners,’ who discourage you and stomp on your creativity and tell you what you can’t do. There are ‘lawn mowers’ – people who are well- intentioned but self-absorbed; they tend to their own needs, mow their own lawns and never leave their yards to help another person.”

Finally, there are ‘life enrichers’ – people who reach out to enrich the lives of others, to lift them up and inspire them. We need to be life enrichers, and we need to surround ourselves with life enrichers.”

Contact me for executive coaching, facilitation and keynote speeches at http://www.amandareynolds.org

Pictorial of the blog thanks to @engagevisually

Want to be a great leader? Learn to Love

Welcome to my blog, one in a series looking at leadership characteristics. Here I draw on my own leadership experience and my work as an executive coach to share with you thoughts on what makes for a great leader. I consider there are a number of leadership characteristics you need to display and work on to be more than average.  I want in this blog to focus on the theme of LOVE.

Short on time have a look at this fabulous graphic provided by @engagevisually

Love is a strange and potentially difficult concept for some of you in the context of buisenss. I’m sure that you didn’t learn Love in Business School and we never talk love in the boardroom.  Well not in the boardrooms I have been a member of that’s for sure.

I like many of you went to business school and my MBA taught me useful skills and strategies for developing, running and growing business. It also taught me the latest thinking on leadership and management and I think with hindsight it acted as a badge of honour to validate my climb up the slippery corporate pole. It taught me particularly to assess and manage risk and ultimately it taught me that we lead through controlling and sometimes by instilling fear in the workforce. Boardroom talk is so often”meet your targets, keep the project on track, assess risks and avoid failure at all costs”. When you do fail then blame the business context, blame the workforce or worst blame the customers for being too demanding or for wanting something else.

If you love someone do you behave like that though?

Business school didn’t teach me how to really engage customers or staff beyond the business norms. I learnt that instead in business settings, from working with senior colleagues, through my reading and through my own experience of leading. I learnt that we need a radically different approach to succeed.

We need the opposite of strong and tough leaders and leadership by fear. We instead need to build business based on LOVE. To love our products, our customers and to love our staff. There is of course a paradox here with what we are taught in business school, practised in our work and how we do business in the west. Business settings often make us think that love is weak and inappropriate in business as it’s not defined by seeking power or control over organisations or others.

If we focus on love we also face a challenge if we are associated with teams and products we don’t or can’t love and don’t believe in. But, if you are in a business or a team you don’t love I think it shows. So, it’s in all of our interest to find ways to love our work and our staff or leave and find the work and people we can love. Unfortunately our approach to business is more often one of shutting down feelings, emotions and connectedness. I have worked for CEOs who have even said:

“No emotions in the boardroom please that makes me uncomfortable.”

Those sorts of business leaders have always troubled me and they often see me as trouble too. As I just can’t lead like that and I don’t think that’s the way to lead either. I’ve been told at times I’m too connected to the staff and customers and I should hold it all more lightly. But, if you want people to follow will they do it if you don’t take their needs seriously? If you don’t commit to them and the business? I don’t think they do and I think that’s why staff engagement is so poor in many of our businesses.

We instead look around at the businesses who are successful, especially the great entrepreneurs. We see that they love their products and they want to share that love with the world. They don’t grow their business to make money. Money is a by-product of a great offer and a great staff team always reside behind that offer. They love their customers and they get a huge sense of satisfaction with the customer’s pleasure and positive experience. They also go to the ends of the earth to fix problems in their business if customers and staff are dissatisfied. This sort of business leadership is rare and I fear becoming rarer in a world of cost cutting, competitive advantage, professional image and regulation.

Deloittes 2015 HR survey suggested culture, employee engagement and retention is now the most pressing challenge for business. So, my summary of their report is we need to find ways to love staff, even if loving is hard and sacrifices something of ourselves on the way. We need to find ways to keep staff and find even better ways to love them back to us if they are disengaged.  http://d2mtr37y39tpbu.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/DUP_GlobalHumanCapitalTrends2015.pdf

If you don’t believe focusing on love would make a difference to you or your team? Just throw into your next team meeting a couple of questions. Ask each team member to take five minutes and write down their responses and then to stick them up on a board.

1. Tell me about the risks and challenges we currently face?
2. What or who do you each love and how does that make you feel?
3. Think about our business and tell me who or what do you love about this place?
4. Think about our products and would our customers say they love them and why?

I tell you, the reactions will astound you, we are desperate to love, we look for love and we are brought alive by love. Whereas power and fear shut us all down and scare us out of innovation, creativity and motivation. In her book, Freedom from Fear, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi said, “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

The opposite of fear is love and the ancient Greeks had 30 words to describe love. Yet we have diminished love to just a few things.  We have often reduced love to erotic love, familial love and friendship love…..but what if we had a broader view of love and brought that to our workplace, our staff, our bosses the business we do,  our customers…how would that change the way we work?

If you remember the movie Jerry Maguire you will remember the character played by Tom Cruise. Jerry loved work with a passion, he loved his business that’s why he wrote that mission statement, that is ultimately why he got sacked in the opening scenes. No one else could get it, engage with it or pull down the façade of business and professionalism they had created. So, they thought Jerry was crazy. Jerry shared the love he had of his only player when he said:

“I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, ok?”

But, for most of the movie Jerry never brought that out in the open into his leading or the way he led. He talked under pressure, in a wash room and angry about never fully telling it. Are you that leader? The one who loves? The one who wells up when a customer tells you how a product disappointed them or how brilliant it was? The one who loves but can’t share it?

I am that leader and I know many of you are too. But why are we scared to show that love and that connection with our product, our customers and our business. Why can’t we talk about love, celebrate it and mean it in business?

We have been shut down by a western view of leadership being about control, holding onto power and success being equated with strength. But deep down we feel a fraud as we know it’s something else that is needed isn’t it?

If we take a minute to reflect on these feelings of connection with staff and customers and our product we start to delve into agape which is the love of and for humanity or  philia, the love we feel from a shared experience. Then we are in touching distance of the space where we need to get to be great business leaders.

If we focus on how we can experience and grow love in an organisation rather than leading by fear and control how would that change us and those we work with? Well I think it would change everything. But we so often don’t do it because it is risky. We are not open in business as we fear that protectionism, envy and power are stronger than love. But look to history and tell me did fear and power and envy ever last in the end or was it eventually overturned by love? That’s why we need to love ourselves, our staff, our customers and our organisations. If we love them they will start to love us back.

I think we need to imagine our customers as our family and friends. We know how to love them don’t we? What would our business be like if we loved our customers and our staff like we love our friends, our family or ours sports team. Making it goo denough for your mum, sticking with them, going the extra mile, getting it right for them and staying with it, admitting it when getting it wrong also.

But be careful as for a start it starts with you as an individual and it will be costly as it would mean changing how you engage. You have to be open, authentic and vulnerable as love hurts. But without love you will slowly die and your leadership and business will not thrive as it might. CS Lewis said in his book The Four Loves:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Our public services and businesses and our staff need love and leaders who love them. We are so familiar with leaders who are self-serving, egotistical or narcissistic. We read of care scandals, over whelmed and exhausted staff and rules after rules and we know they are not the answer. We cannot change these issues overnight but we need to think about a different approach.

A few years ago I was working for the UK government and had the privilege of organising a study tour to Sweden to look at their model of Dementia care. I took about 20 senior leaders. Civil servants, Public health doctors, social services directors and general practitioners. We visited a number of care settings and met staff and leaders of those services. One day we were in a dementia day centre and the staff member was affectionately holding the hand of an elderly lady with dementia. She had her dog in the unit and would kiss her dog then spontaneous kiss the staff member. Another lady was cutting up apples for a pie (badly and slowly I must add). The place was happy and there was sense of calm, love and affection in it. We asked about lunch and were told they would eat when the pie was ready and that might be later than 12 noon. They operated like your family would, lunch came when lunch came and all contributed.  So very unlike any units you expect to see in this sort of care setting.

Later as a visiting group we discussed what we found and all concluded rather jokingly that based on what we saw we would like Swedish citizenship so we could be cared for that way. But sadly we reflected that in our system that model of care would not be tolerated as the professional boundaries and regulations were challenged by this approach. But we all agreed that they had love and that’s what we wanted if we needed care in old age.

We asked the leader later over dinner with us why the staff interacted this way and how they maintained professional boundaries when staff did this. Horrified she had misheard our questions she asking our interpreter to translate again. She then took a deep breath and replied:

“We love these people, we can’t do this work without love. We help them by being alongside them, they are not calm, happy or cared for without our staff loving them.”

The next day our meeting with another senior leader was delayed as there had been an incident overnight and she was being interviewed on TV  by local media. We assumed it was a death or a patient had disappeared from the unit. The sort of issues we would go to the media about in the UK. We were genuinely shocked to discover she had called the press in herself. To tell them the service had failed a lady by leaving her unattended and alone on the toilet for an hour and the staff were upset they had let her down. The sort of reaction you would give if you left your own toddler in the supermarket by mistake but not as a business leader. She was the leader of this service and crying on local TV about this incident as if it had happened to her own mother. That looked like love  to me.

So, how do we start to bring love into the business where you are? Start that personal and business journey today. Simply start to love and you will be loved by your staff, your team your customers. Ask your colleagues the questions I outlined above.   Put on your wall in your office a sign saying: if this business were loving its customers what would it be doing? Wait for your visitors to notice the sign and make suggestions.

Remember this is a journey, a mind set shift and you can’t do this overnight and it will hurt at times. Get a coach yourself and a facilitator for your team to discuss this and start to think about having these conversations with staff. When it hurts and is difficult you will need a safe place to take that pain and frustration and to keep working on it so you don’t shut down under the pressure to be open and real.

Let’s finish with that great book The Velveteen Rabbit – as this is how love really works:

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Do contact me for executive coaching face to face or SKYPE, mentoring and leadership speaking. I might be some of the difference you need and I would love to work with you on your leadership journey.

http://www.amandareynolds.org

Want to be a great leader? Learn to Love

Welcome to my blog, in this series I explore leadership characteristics. Here I draw on my own leadership experience and my work as an executive coach to share with you thoughts on what makes for a great leader. I consider there are a number of leadership characteristics you need to display and work on to be more than average.  I want in this blog to focus on the theme of LOVE.

Short on time have a look at this fabulous graphic provided by @engagevisually

Love is a strange and potentially difficult concept for some of you in the context of buisenss. I’m sure that you didn’t learn Love in Business School and we never talk love in the boardroom.  Well not in the boardrooms I have been a member of that’s for sure.

I like many of you went to business school and my MBA taught me useful skills and strategies for developing, running and growing business. It also taught me the latest thinking on leadership and management and I think with hindsight it acted as a badge of honour to validate my climb up the slippery corporate pole. It taught me particularly to assess and manage risk and ultimately it taught me that we lead through controlling and sometimes by instilling fear in the workforce. Boardroom talk is so often”meet your targets, keep the project on track, assess risks and avoid failure at all costs”. When you do fail then blame the business context, blame the workforce or worst blame the customers for being too demanding or for wanting something else.

If you love someone do you behave like that though?

Business school didn’t teach me how to really engage customers or staff beyond the business norms. I learnt that instead in business settings, from working with senior colleagues, through my reading and through my own experience of leading. I learnt that we need a radically different approach to succeed.

We need the opposite of strong and tough leaders and leadership by fear. We instead need to build business based on LOVE. To love our products, our customers and to love our staff. There is of course a paradox here with what we are taught in business school, practised in our work and how we do business in the west. Business settings often make us think that love is weak and inappropriate in business as it’s not defined by seeking power or control over organisations or others.

If we focus on love we also face a challenge if we are associated with teams and products we don’t or can’t love and don’t believe in. But, if you are in a business or a team you don’t love I think it shows. So, it’s in all of our interest to find ways to love our work and our staff or leave and find the work and people we can love. Unfortunately our approach to business is more often one of shutting down feelings, emotions and connectedness. I have worked for CEOs who have even said:

“No emotions in the boardroom please that makes me uncomfortable.”

Those sorts of business leaders have always troubled me and they often see me as trouble too. As I just can’t lead like that and I don’t think that’s the way to lead either. I’ve been told at times I’m too connected to the staff and customers and I should hold it all more lightly. But, if you want people to follow will they do it if you don’t take their needs seriously? If you don’t commit to them and the business? I don’t think they do and I think that’s why staff engagement is so poor in many of our businesses.

We instead look around at the businesses who are successful, especially the great entrepreneurs. We see that they love their products and they want to share that love with the world. They don’t grow their business to make money. Money is a by-product of a great offer and a great staff team always reside behind that offer. They love their customers and they get a huge sense of satisfaction with the customer’s pleasure and positive experience. They also go to the ends of the earth to fix problems in their business if customers and staff are dissatisfied. This sort of business leadership is rare and I fear becoming rarer in a world of cost cutting, competitive advantage, professional image and regulation.

Deloittes 2015 HR survey suggested culture, employee engagement and retention is now the most pressing challenge for business. So, my summary of their report is we need to find ways to love staff, even if loving is hard and sacrifices something of ourselves on the way. We need to find ways to keep staff and find even better ways to love them back to us if they are disengaged.  http://d2mtr37y39tpbu.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/DUP_GlobalHumanCapitalTrends2015.pdf

If you don’t believe focusing on love would make a difference to you or your team? Just throw into your next team meeting a couple of questions. Ask each team member to take five minutes and write down their responses and then to stick them up on a board.

1. Tell me about the risks and challenges we currently face?
2. What or who do you each love and how does that make you feel?
3. Think about our business and tell me who or what do you love about this place?
4. Think about our products and would our customers say they love them and why?

I tell you, the reactions will astound you, we are desperate to love, we look for love and we are brought alive by love. Whereas power and fear shut us all down and scare us out of innovation, creativity and motivation. In her book, Freedom from Fear, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi said, “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

The opposite of fear is love and the ancient Greeks had 30 words to describe love. Yet we have diminished love to just a few things.  We have often reduced love to erotic love, familial love and friendship love…..but what if we had a broader view of love and brought that to our workplace, our staff, our bosses the business we do,  our customers…how would that change the way we work?

If you remember the movie Jerry Maguire you will remember the character played by Tom Cruise. Jerry loved work with a passion, he loved his business that’s why he wrote that mission statement, that is ultimately why he got sacked in the opening scenes. No one else could get it, engage with it or pull down the façade of business and professionalism they had created. So, they thought Jerry was crazy. Jerry shared the love he had of his only player when he said:

“I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, ok?”

But, for most of the movie Jerry never brought that out in the open into his leading or the way he led. He talked under pressure, in a wash room and angry about never fully telling it. Are you that leader? The one who loves? The one who wells up when a customer tells you how a product disappointed them or how brilliant it was? The one who loves but can’t share it?

I am that leader and I know many of you are too. But why are we scared to show that love and that connection with our product, our customers and our business. Why can’t we talk about love, celebrate it and mean it in business?

We have been shut down by a western view of leadership being about control, holding onto power and success being equated with strength. But deep down we feel a fraud as we know it’s something else that is needed isn’t it?

If we take a minute to reflect on these feelings of connection with staff and customers and our product we start to delve into agape which is the love of and for humanity or  philia, the love we feel from a shared experience. Then we are in touching distance of the space where we need to get to be great business leaders.

If we focus on how we can experience and grow love in an organisation rather than leading by fear and control how would that change us and those we work with? Well I think it would change everything. But we so often don’t do it because it is risky. We are not open in business as we fear that protectionism, envy and power are stronger than love. But look to history and tell me did fear and power and envy ever last in the end or was it eventually overturned by love? That’s why we need to love ourselves, our staff, our customers and our organisations. If we love them they will start to love us back.

I think we need to imagine our customers as our family and friends. We know how to love them don’t we? What would our business be like if we loved our customers and our staff like we love our friends, our family or ours sports team. Making it goo denough for your mum, sticking with them, going the extra mile, getting it right for them and staying with it, admitting it when getting it wrong also.

But be careful as for a start it starts with you as an individual and it will be costly as it would mean changing how you engage. You have to be open, authentic and vulnerable as love hurts. But without love you will slowly die and your leadership and business will not thrive as it might. CS Lewis said in his book The Four Loves:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Our public services and businesses and our staff need love and leaders who love them. We are so familiar with leaders who are self-serving, egotistical or narcissistic. We read of care scandals, over whelmed and exhausted staff and rules after rules and we know they are not the answer. We cannot change these issues overnight but we need to think about a different approach.

A few years ago I was working for the UK government and had the privilege of organising a study tour to Sweden to look at their model of Dementia care. I took about 20 senior leaders. Civil servants, Public health doctors, social services directors and general practitioners. We visited a number of care settings and met staff and leaders of those services. One day we were in a dementia day centre and the staff member was affectionately holding the hand of an elderly lady with dementia. She had her dog in the unit and would kiss her dog then spontaneous kiss the staff member. Another lady was cutting up apples for a pie (badly and slowly I must add). The place was happy and there was sense of calm, love and affection in it. We asked about lunch and were told they would eat when the pie was ready and that might be later than 12 noon. They operated like your family would, lunch came when lunch came and all contributed.  So very unlike any units you expect to see in this sort of care setting.

Later as a visiting group we discussed what we found and all concluded rather jokingly that based on what we saw we would like Swedish citizenship so we could be cared for that way. But sadly we reflected that in our system that model of care would not be tolerated as the professional boundaries and regulations were challenged by this approach. But we all agreed that they had love and that’s what we wanted if we needed care in old age.

We asked the leader later over dinner with us why the staff interacted this way and how they maintained professional boundaries when staff did this. Horrified she had misheard our questions she asking our interpreter to translate again. She then took a deep breath and replied:

“We love these people, we can’t do this work without love. We help them by being alongside them, they are not calm, happy or cared for without our staff loving them.”

The next day our meeting with another senior leader was delayed as there had been an incident overnight and she was being interviewed on TV  by local media. We assumed it was a death or a patient had disappeared from the unit. The sort of issues we would go to the media about in the UK. We were genuinely shocked to discover she had called the press in herself. To tell them the service had failed a lady by leaving her unattended and alone on the toilet for an hour and the staff were upset they had let her down. The sort of reaction you would give if you left your own toddler in the supermarket by mistake but not as a business leader. She was the leader of this service and crying on local TV about this incident as if it had happened to her own mother. That looked like love  to me.

So, how do we start to bring love into the business where you are? Start that personal and business journey today. Simply start to love and you will be loved by your staff, your team your customers. Ask your colleagues the questions I outlined above.   Put on your wall in your office a sign saying: if this business were loving its customers what would it be doing? Wait for your visitors to notice the sign and make suggestions.

Remember this is a journey, a mind set shift and you can’t do this overnight and it will hurt at times. Get a coach yourself and a facilitator for your team to discuss this and start to think about having these conversations with staff. When it hurts and is difficult you will need a safe place to take that pain and frustration and to keep working on it so you don’t shut down under the pressure to be open and real.

Let’s finish with that great book The Velveteen Rabbit – as this is how love really works:

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Do contact me for executive coaching face to face or SKYPE, mentoring and leadership speaking. I might be some of the difference you need and I would love to work with you on your leadership journey.

http://www.amandareynolds.org

Are public sector leaders of any use to the private sector?

I have been pondering this question a bit lately as I am one of 100s of public sector managers who lost out in a board restructure/downsizing. We are all too familiar with the “cull of public sector posts” and with further treasury cuts proposed there will be many more.

Affected and not that young any more but too young to retire, so what to do? I diligently set up a company to ply my strategy & operational management skills. I built my social media presence & I networked furiously asking anyone & everyone: “What is the success of your independent company?”

I Continued with professional development with a post graduate executive coaching & mentor qualification. I  keep my board room skills honed as a Non-Executive for a community trust.  I offered probono support to my son’s school as a year 11 mentor & to my church where I coach the newest leader there.  I read, I watched, I listened and I blogged.

Now increasingly on the outside looking in I have had time to reflect on the quality of leadership across the public sector and leadership skills more generally.  I joined the public sector soon after the Griffiths reforms http://nhstimeline.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/. That was about increased efficiency & bringing private sector managers into the NHS and professionalising management  I benefited  personally by accessing great learning & development and culminating in my Business School MBA. Now on the outside I find myself  supporting private & independent sector companies, individual entrepreneurs, not for profit & education.  Im loving that so the questions arose;

Do public sector managers transition to the private sector and do you want our skills?

In their report “The challenges of transition: from public to private” Hays and the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry look at the assumptions held on public sector managers by the private sector & public sector views of the other. The reports suggest skills are transferable in some instances and we should be open minded to this.

If you are in the private sector and you look carefully at the public sector (maybe via LinkedIn) you will find people who have operated at a senior level with a range of really valuable skills.

So, what can we offer?

“Management of multi-million pound budgets, including critical decision making • Identification and implementation of cost control and best-value initiatives • Compliance with complex regulatory or legislative requirements • Management and mitigation of risk • Development of people and teams • Management of complex, highly political stakeholder relationships • Knowledge of how governmental organisations work and an in-depth understanding of their requirements”

Many of these skills are invaluable in other sectors & new external insights in the board room are always really valuable.

But do public sector managers transition to the private sector & should you recruit them?

Of course the answer is Yes and here are some tips to recruit the best:

• Look for those who have worked across a range of organisations
• Who have experience in a range of settings & geography
• Those with a flexible attitude & a range of skills to offer you and your share holders
• those who are still learning & are curious
• then test if they can get excited about you and your business – find the passion 

BUT BEWARE not all public sector managers can make that transition. Some may like the routine of pay, pension and the structure of a big organisation to hide in. Anyone coming to the private sector will need help to understand what’s different & demonstrate to the private sector they understand:

• how  objectives have to be met that clearly deliver profit and shareholder value
• needing to act quickly and with autonomy to respond to the market
• they will work innovatively, non-hierarchically & within company law
• there is much less bureaucracy
• the private sector has some great leadership roles to offer

And of course I am always looking for new opportunities inside & outside the public sector as a coach & strategist http://www.amandareynolds.org

Bitesize Leadership & Curiosity

Welcome to my bite size. One of 12 blogs in a new series looking at leadership characteristics. I think curiosity is an important and under developed skill for leaders.

Being curious can have negative connotations but the proverb was never intended to be “curiosity killed the cat”. It was “care killed the cat” and it got changed in the 18^th century to curiosity.   Curiosity is having a strong desire to learn or to know something.

Learning something new grows your brain. Called brain neuroplasticity scientists are discovering that adult brains can still grow and can be trained to improve. The flip side if you don’t keep growing your brain is it will diminish. When you are learning a new skill and you repeat it you grow your brain by making new neural connections.

As a leader wouldn’t it be great if your brain was bigger? Curiosity will encourage your brain to change and grow, enhancing and developing your focus. You will spot opportunity, new people, new contacts, and new ways to do things. This is not magic as it will require work and practise just like developing your other skills required time and effort.

SAID Business School in their CEO report described a new type of leadership intelligence needed in addition to emotional and contextual intelligence. The best CEOs seem to possess something they call ripple intelligence. Quoting Dr.Michael Smets:

“The ability to see the interactions of business contexts like ripples moving across a pond.”

“Ripple intelligence also makes CEOs aware of their own impact and how it may influence contexts that might otherwise seem remote and unconnected. *

Practising curiosity is a tool that could help you develop your ripple intelligence. Think about it in action in business breakthroughs. Richard Branson went on a delayed and disrupted flight and became curious about how to fix it. He didn’t run airlines, he had no experience in that field but he became curious and now we have Virgin Airlines.

Try being more curious it could lead to great breakthrough in you as a leader or your business:

• Take something apart, look inside see what’s there and how it all fits together and then try and put it back together.
• Buy a magazine on a subject you do not know about and take time to read it.

• Take an elder out to lunch (a neighbour maybe) ask about their life story.
• Ask someone different to you what the latest movie was they saw and then go see it.
• Learn a language or try painting.

After each activity make a note what am I learning? What is different here? Share these reflections with your leadership coach as they can help you process, reflect and grow that brain function a bit more.

So go on, have a little try at being curious and remember what Albert Einstein said; never lose a holy curiosity.

Contact me for executive coaching, facilitation and keynote speeches at http://www.amandareynolds.org

Pictorial of the blog thanks to @engagevisually