Episode 45 - Overcoming a Fear of Delegation

Summary

Delegation - it’s something that every successful leader needs to do in order to perform and progress, yet most leaders under-delegate. This week we explore ways of overcoming a fear of delegation.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 45 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at ways of overcoming a fear of delegation.

Chances are that, like most leaders, you struggle with delegation. And this under-delegation has a significant impact on personal, team and organisational performance. 

People don’t delegate enough for a range of reasons, but here are some typical ones:

1. It will be faster to just do it myself - delegating takes too much time and is inefficient

2. Performance will drop - the person I delegate it to just won’t do it as well as I could, so delegation is bad for quality

3. I don’t trust people to get it done - delegation leads to unreliable results

4. I don’t want to trouble people - delegating work to others is a hassle for them

If any of those reasons or excuses for not delegating ring true for you then congratulations - you’ve found the level of job you will remain in for life.  And I’m saying that as someone who really struggled with delegation - there’s no judgement here! But the extent to which we delegate is the pace at which we progress. 

However there is hope - becoming better at delegating just requires a shift in mindset and a few simple techniques. 

First the shift in mindset. If you think delegation is just about getting things done, then the earlier reasons not to delegate make perfect sense. Yes - it could well be faster to do it yourself. Yes - you will probably do it better. Yes - if you don’t delegate you’re not dependent on anyone else that can let you down. And yes - your people won’t be hassled by additional work. But all of these reasons not to delegate are short term focused. 

If we take a longer term view we see that delegation is actually about developing others which in turn increases the capacity of the organisation to deliver. Delegation is about individual and organisational growth. 

That shift in thinking made all the difference for me. Suddenly the things that I used to hold on to were great opportunities for my team to stretch themselves and grow. Delegating helped them to progress, and it also helped me to progress. Shifting the question from “should I delegate?” to “should I develop others?” will make you much more willing to delegate. 

So let’s say I’ve encouraged you to give delegation another try. A reasonable question is what to delegate. It’s important to delegate meaningful things that will challenge others - things for which they can take full accountability. In fact, a useful exercise is to think about if you had to delegate all of your work, how would you do it? How can you start preparing your team now to be able to take on even the more challenging parts of your role? I’m not suggesting you then delegate all of your role, but it may unlock some additional opportunities to delegate and develop others.

When shouldn’t you delegate? You need to be careful delegating when there’s a combination of time pressure and lack of capability. When you don’t have time to develop and support the person, you’re setting yourself and them up for failure. If it’s genuinely urgent and important, then it’s typically best to do it yourself. But if everything is always urgent and important then that’s a pattern that you need to challenge. 

So how should we delegate? Here are four principles to keep in mind: 

1. Be clear about the purpose - why does this delegated responsibility matter in relation to the organisation, the individual and their development.

2. Focus on the outcomes not the process - resist the temptation to tell them how to achieve results, but rather give them the end outcome that’s required.

3. Be available to coach - let the individual know that you’re available to coach them through anything they are struggling with, and set aside time to do this.

4. Build in update points - set some milestone points up at the start when you will check in with the person. This will help you to manage your anxiety levels around how the work is progressing without hovering around or inserting yourself in the process at unexpected points.

Delegation is something that every successful leader needs to do in order to perform and progress. Give it another try this week and let me know how you go.

Episode 44 - 10 Leadership Lessons From Year One of the Leadership Today Podcast

Summary

Reflection is important in our development as leaders. In that spirit, this week we look at 10 things we’ve learned from year one of the Leadership Today podcast. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 44 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week is a little different as we look at 10 things we’ve learned from year one of the Leadership Today podcast. 

It has been one year since we launched the Leadership Today podcast, and it has been a privilege to play a small part in the development of thousands of leaders. Across the year there have been some stand out lessons about leadership, and also things I’ve learned from producing a weekly leadership podcast.

Here are ten leadership lessons from the back catalogue of 43 episodes that have stood out:

1. The power of habits - so much of our effectiveness as leaders rests in non-urgent but important activities. Habits allow us to prioritise these activities. This could include routines around planning, reflection, exercise and connections with others. None of these things are ever urgent, so building habits is a great way to ensure they get done.

2. Mindset matters - taking on a positive growth mindset helps us to make better decisions, to stretch ourselves into new areas, and to develop our capability.

3. Leaders can’t motivate anyone directly, but they can construct motivating environments - our key role as leaders is to set up and maintain the conditions for success.

4. Great leaders regularly share the vision and connect it to the things people care about - this requires us to formulate a clear picture of the future and to be interested enough in our people to see how it links to what motivates and interests them.

5. Influence and assertiveness are the vehicles to making a positive impact - you can have the best ideas in the world, but if no one knows or cares then our ideas are worthless. Fortunately we can all build our influence and assertiveness.

6. Seek and provide feedback - people can’t grow and thrive in a feedback vacuum. Look for opportunities to provide feedback daily, focusing on the positive more than the corrective. And make sure you surround yourself with people who can provide feedback to shape your own development.

7. Resilience is partly about people and partly about environments - as leaders we can create toxic work environments that undo even the most resilient person, or we can craft work environments that foster resilience. So many organisations are rolling out resilience programs in an attempt to toughen up their people, when the real problem rests in job design and organisational culture.

8. Learning is both hard and motivating - anyone can become a great leader, but it takes effort and you never truly ‘arrive’. If we continue to stretch ourselves, there’s always moments of conscious incompetence and feeling clumsy before we become good at something.

9. Take time to reflect - regularly review how you’re spending your time, and how that aligns with your values and what matters to you.

10. Create a legacy - investing in the next wave of leaders makes you a far more effective leader. There is so much we can learn from our people - we don’t need to be the ones with all the answers, but we do need to demonstrate interest in and invest in our people.

Hopefully there’s something amongst those lessons that has resonated with you. I encourage you to step out and try something new - don’t die wondering. Have a great week, and I look forward to sharing the next year with you as we continue to develop our leadership together.

Episode 43 - How Thinking in the Third Person Makes You a Wiser Leader

Summary

As leaders we need to make wise decisions in often complex and emotionally charged situations. This week we look at two techniques for making wiser decisions.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 43 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at two techniques for making wiser decisions.

As leaders we need to make decisions in often complex and emotionally charged situations.

When it comes to making decisions, we are often encouraged to think of our brain like it’s a computer - that our consciousness is the sum total of electrical impulses rushing around circuits producing a stream of thoughts. However, our brains aren’t just thinking machines - they’re also emotion machines. What the computer analogy overlooks is the electro-chemical nature of the brain - that our thoughts and emotions aren’t just about electrical impulses, but also about the chemicals that interact with and moderate these systems. Our brain constantly influences, and is influenced by, our emotional state. 

Our emotional state can help or hinder our decision making. When we’re in a positive emotional state we make better decisions and more readily identify the up side potential of situations. When we’re anxious or stressed we tend to focus on the negatives and become less creative and more risk averse.

To make wiser decisions, it’s helpful to separate out the thoughts and feelings associated with the situation - to recognise the feelings, and act on the facts. One way to do this is to take a third person perspective. Research outlined by David Robson shows that thinking in the third person improves decision making. This approach increases our willingness to consider others’ perspectives, and also allows us to be more open to new ways of thinking about the situation.

Let’s consider an example - that I have a difficult meeting coming up with one of my team members.

Using this approach I switch from saying to myself “I have a challenging conversation coming up with John” to “Andrew has a challenging conversation coming up with John”. I can then work though a series of questions:

1. How do I feel about the situation? What emotions am I experiencing? Perhaps I’m feeling frustrated with how John has approached an issue and am worried about how he will respond to the feedback I need to give him. Even the process of naming the emotions reduces some of their ‘charge’ and control over our thinking.

2. What are the facts of the situation? What’s the data that others would also see and agree with? Before I have my meeting with John, it would be helpful to note down the facts as they relate to the conversation we’re about to have.

3. What advice would I give to a friend in the same situation I’m facing? This helps us to consider the situation at a distance. With John this would allow me to view the situation at arm’s length rather than getting too caught up in the details and history.

One other approach that can help you to act more wisely is to make a decision and then choose to run with it. Once you’ve considered all the factors, commit to your course of action for a set period of time without revisiting it. This approach can help to reduce the rumination and worry that leads us to make poor decisions. For example, research shows that people who check their stock market investments more frequently end up making worse investment decisions and earn lower returns than those who check less frequently. Those who check frequently tend to focus on the negatives and pull out of investments too quickly. It’s similar to people who are always thinking about getting a better job and keep checking for new opportunities - they tend to end up constantly worried and less satisfied with their current job than if they had committed to the job for a period of several months.

This week I encourage you to look for opportunities to apply these two approaches - considering situations in the third person and then sticking to your decisions.

References

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/05/24/a-new-trial-of-an-ancient-rhetorical-trick-finds-it-can-make-you-wiser/

https://www.betterment.com/resources/high-frequency-monitoring/

Episode 42 - The Power of "I Don't Know"

Summary

Recognising that we don’t have all the answers makes us more effective as leaders - there’s power in saying “I don’t know”.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 42 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week’s episode is the power of “I don’t know” - how, as leaders, recognising that we don’t have all the answers can make us more effective.

Some leaders feel that, to be truly effective, they need to have all the answers. These leaders think saying “I don’t know” demonstrates weakness, inadequacy or being unqualified for the job. That was my experience when I first moved from being an individual contributor to leading others. As a management consultant, much of my value was in my knowledge, experience and expertise. So I initially carried that same mindset into leadership. And the research shows that’s exactly what many leaders do - they try to stay in the role of ‘expert’. However, needing to have all the answers places an extraordinary burden on an individual. And our people just don’t buy it - it comes off as an act and a facade that no one can maintain forever.

Recent research shows that people who think they know it all routinely overestimate their cognitive capability - put simply, they aren’t as smart as they think they are. And this mindset has flow on impacts for the way they approach learning and new opportunities. Why would you try to learn more if you think you already know enough? Sure enough, the research shows that “know it alls” end up being less reflective and less curious than others. They stop learning and growing, limiting their future potential.

Other leaders recognise that they can’t know everything - that there’s always more to learn. Researchers call this mindset “intellectual humility”. It’s like having a growth mindset towards knowledge.

Research shows that people with intellectual humility benefit in six ways:

1. They have greater general knowledge - those who can admit they don’t know actually know more than others

2. Their knowledge is more accurate - they are right more often than other people

3. They are more reflective - they take more time to think about their approach

4. They enjoy mentally challenging tasks - stretching their minds further

5. They are intellectually curious - they seek out new knowledge and experiences

6. They are motivated to learn for the sake of new knowledge - they have wide interests, not just those needed for their job

It pays to recognise that you can’t know everything and that there’s always more to learn.

There’s a difference between saying “I don’t know” and not actually taking the time to find out. I once heard about a manager whose nickname was ’Mirrors’ - because whenever people asked him a question he’d always say “I’ll look into it”. But he didn’t follow through. This erodes trust - you need to close the loop.

Three things to try this week:

1. Recognise it’s okay not to know everything - it’s a change in mindset, so think about the mindset you’re currently bringing and challenge it

2. Be curious to learn more - not just in your field of expertise - a while back I completed an online MasterClass by the comedian Steve Martin which taught me a lot about story telling and structuring communication - I didn’t complete the course to help with my work, but the applications to my work have been surprisingly beneficial

3. Coach rather than tell - foster an inquisitive mindset in your team - help them to see that they don’t need to know everything either

Just something quick before you go. The Leadership Today podcast has hit the Apple Podcast charts in a diverse range of countries including USA, Great Britain, Canada, India, Ireland, Brazil, Colombia, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Slovakia, Australia, and New Zealand. Whenever the podcast or an episode gets into the charts, it helps a whole bunch of new listeners who can benefit from the material to find the podcast. We don’t have advertising and genuinely see this podcast as a gift to help leaders achieve results through people - there isn’t a catch. So I would really appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to provide a rating or review - in Apple Podcasts would be great, but whatever platform you use. Plus it’s fantastic to hear your feedback on the show - you can contact me via the Leadership Today website. Thanks.

Reference

Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso, Megan C. Haggard, Jordan P. LaBouff & Wade C. Rowatt (2019) Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge,The Journal of Positive Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359

Episode 41 - Is Putting Employees First Actually Better for Customers?

Summary

This week we explore whether putting employees first ahead of customers and shareholders leads to better customer service and financial results.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 41 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we explore whether putting employees first, that is ahead of customers and shareholders, actually produces better customer service and financial results.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, once famously said “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.” It’s a sentiment that stands in stark contrast to “the customer is always right” and “shareholder value” formulas tracing back to the early 1900’s. 

During an interview with Inc, Branson continues “It should go without saying, if the person who works at your company is 100 percent proud of the brand and you give them the tools to do a good job and they are treated well, they're going to be happy… Effectively, in the end shareholders do well, the customers do better, and your staff remain happy”.

This sounds like a nice management philosophy, particularly from an employee perspective - what employee wouldn’t want to be put first? But does the research back up this link between employee engagement, customer satisfaction and financial performance? 

Large scale research into the link between employee engagement, customer satisfaction and results is actually less common than you might think. A 2008 study by Maxham, Netemeyer and Lichtenstein covered over 1,600 retail employees, servicing over 57,000 customers across 306 stores. Their research found direct links between employee engagement, customer satisfaction and financial performance.

The research highlighted three main findings:

1. Conscientious employees who feel they are treated fairly and who identify with the organisation perform better in their jobs.

2. Increased job performance, not just doing their job well, but going above and beyond for the customer, leads to higher customer evaluations.

3. Customer evaluations around satisfaction, purchase intent, loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals, lead to higher customer spending and store sales growth.

The researchers found that even a one point increase in customer evaluations was associated with customers spending over $12 more per transaction, a 15% increase. And as customer evaluations increased, transaction values and sales growth increased at an even greater rate - it wasn’t just a straight line relationship. Other analysis of multiple studies by Harter and Schmidt also supports these links.

I think this research has four main implications for leaders:

1. Hire well - hire conscientious people who love your organisation and want to go above and beyond.

2. Treat employees well - fairness matters, give them great leaders to work for who also love the organisation and want to go above and beyond.

3. Focus on systems and front line frustrations - as a customer it’s common to hear people apologising for their system or some clunky process. Ask your frontline teams about frustrations and remove them. A CEO of a major bank I worked for would call several bank tellers once a month to hear about their experiences on the front line, cutting through multiple layers.

4. Look to other examples - research broader trends in customer service, including the interesting things others are doing outside your industry.

If we take these steps, we will be well on our way to putting our people first, and delivering better results for customers and shareholders.

References

https://www.inc.com/oscar-raymundo/richard-branson-companies-should-put-employees-first.html

Harter & Schmidt (2002) Business-Unit-Level Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement, and Business Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Maxham, Netemeyer & Lichtenstein (2008) The Retail Value Chain: Linking Employee Perceptions to Employee Performance, Customer Evaluations, and Store Performance. Marketing Science.

Episode 40 - Are Workaholics Bad for Business?

Summary

We have come to celebrate workaholics in our organisations - those people who always seem to be busy and putting in long hours. But is it possible for a person to be too engaged with their work? And does that lead to burnout and negative performance?

Transcript

Welcome to episode 40 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we explore whether workaholics are bad for business.

We have come to celebrate workaholics in our organisations - those people who always seem to be busy and putting in long hours. But is it possible for a person to be too engaged with their work? And does that lead to burnout and negative performance?

Most models of employee engagement don't examine what actually drives people to work hard and contribute more to an organisation. This muddies the water between what researchers call workaholism and work engagement. As a result, employee engagement scores and measures of performance don't always align. Organisations with high employee engagement can sometimes be perplexed by relatively poor performance and the high incidence of burnout and other negative health outcomes amongst their people.

One study by van Beek and her colleagues separated workaholism and work engagement into two distinct concepts. The researchers then looked at various combinations of the two including the impact on burnout. They defined workaholism as the tendency to work excessively hard and being obsessed with work - working compulsively. In contrast, they saw work engagement as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterised by energy, dedication and becoming absorbed in your work.

Their research showed that workaholism and work engagement both lead people to work harder and for longer hours. But it was the incidence of burnout amongst these groups that was most interesting. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, being a workaholic increased the incidence of burnout over non-workaholics. The researchers linked this to work-home interference, poor social relationships, and high levels of job strain. In contrast, being engaged with work decreased the incidence of burnout versus the non-engaged. Interestingly, combining the two, that is being a work-engaged workaholic, decreased the level of burnout below that of your regular workaholic. It also reduced the incidence of burnout to below that of non-engaged non-workaholics. Being positively engaged with work appears to dampen the negative impact of being a workaholic when it comes to burnout. 

This research suggests that improving work engagement will lessen the chance of burnout, even for the workaholics in our organisations. As leaders we can help workaholics in our teams to become aware of what motivates them, allowing them to identify greater meaning and purpose in their work. Understanding the difference between workaholism and employee engagement can do wonders to increasing the sustainability of performance in your organisation. Leaders can set up the conditions that encourage our people to become absorbed in their work versus becoming obsessed and compulsive about the work they complete.

Reference

Ilona van Beek, Toon W. Taris and Wilmar B. Schaufeli (2011) Workaholic and Work Engaged Employees: Dead Ringers or Worlds Apart? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol 16, No 4, 468-482.

Episode 39 - Four Ways Leaders Build Trust

Summary

Trust is the essential currency of any organisation however, it seems to be in short supply these days. This week we look at four ways in which leaders can build trust.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 39 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at four ways in which leaders can build trust.

Trust is the essential currency of any organisation however, it seems to be in short supply these days. And trust has a huge impact on the effectiveness of teams and organisations. Without trust, three things happen:

1. People hesitate - they become reluctant to act, and instead sit back, giving less than their best

2. People make up stories - they try to make sense of what’s happening, and create stories, usually negative, that help to explain actions and events

3. People leave - as the trust bank account dwindles, staff turnover increases

So why is it that we trust some people more than others? Psychological research gives us some important insights. We trust people that we believe have good intentions for us, and who follow through on those intentions.

First, let’s look at the good intentions part - we trust people who have good intentions for us. It’s important to note that it’s good intentions for us that matters - having good intentions for the organisation or even others is not enough. For a leader to build trust, they need to understand what matters to their people. You can’t build trust without uncovering the needs and interests of your people. Without that, people begin to question the leader’s motives and anticipate a negative impact of their actions.

And, second, a leader you can trust is someone who follows through. They’re predictable and act in the way you expect. It’s not enough to just say the right things - trustworthy leaders follow through.

I was a leader in a management consulting firm as we sailed towards the Global Financial Crisis. After several years of record growth, clients were suddenly delaying projects as they tried to cut back on spending. As a result we made a decision to decrease our costs by 10% which, in a consulting firm, equates to people. I laid out the facts to my team - that our revenue was falling and we had to reduce costs or start laying off staff. We wanted to keep people, and were exploring ways to achieve a cost saving while having the smallest impact on people possible. We worked together to propose everyone on the team voluntarily move to a nine day fortnight, meaning they would lose one day of work every two weeks and take a 10% pay cut. People signed up to this because they understood we had their best interests at heart - people wanted to keep their jobs, and this was one way of ensuring they could do that. We also found that people quite liked having a day off every two weeks, and that productivity even lifted despite fewer days being worked. And I moved to a nine day fortnight too, which was an important demonstration of my personal commitment to the change. Without trust, people might have seen the change as a money-grabbing exercise and been less engaged with their work and the organisation. 

Here are four ways you can build trust as a leader:

1. Uncover your team members’ interests and needs - in that way you can align your actions to their needs

2. Share your intent - let people know what you’re trying to achieve, and how that aligns with their interests, being as open as you can

3. Follow through - do what you said you would do

4. Let them know you’ve followed through - don’t just leave them to join the dots, help them to see that you have followed through

I believe any leader can build trust, but it needs to be authentic. People are finely tuned to when someone’s words don’t align with their actions. So keep in mind what it takes to be a trustworthy leader - it’s someone who demonstrates good intentions for others, and follows through on those intentions.

Episode 38 - Do People Really Shoot the Messenger?

Summary

As a leader, it’s likely that you have had to deliver bad news. It can be extremely difficult to do well. This week we look at practical ways to deliver negative news, and hopefully not become the messenger that gets shot in the process.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 38 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at practical ways to deliver negative news, and hopefully not become the messenger that gets shot in the process.

No doubt you’ve heard the saying “Don’t shoot the messenger”. You might think it’s just another saying, but recent research suggests that is exactly what we do. Through a series of experiments the researchers at Harvard found that people end up not liking those who bear bad news, even when the person wasn’t the decision maker. And the impact is literally on ratings of the messenger - people don’t end up thinking any less of another representative standing next to the messenger while the bad news is shared. The effect of people disliking the messenger is particularly strong when the bad news isn’t expected or doesn’t make complete sense to the person receiving the news. The researchers saw such news as challenging our assumptions that the world is “just, predictable, and comprehensible”. In such circumstances we tend to question the motives of the messenger - what are they really trying to do, and what are they getting out of it?

Once the bad news is delivered, people may be less likely to then want to interact with the messenger, but the messenger is often the very person who is best placed to offer support for next steps.

As a leader, the most difficult news I had to deliver was making people redundant - people I knew well and liked that we had to let go for reasons entirely out of their control. We had about as good a process as we could around that, but the relationships with the individuals were permanently damaged. Just like the research suggested, they naturally thought less of me as the messenger. After all, who wants to keep in touch with the person who made them redundant?

But there are some steps we can take to help avoid being the messenger that gets shot:

1. Be direct and clear - it can be tempting to try to soften the news, but just end up making it less clear. What are the fewest words you can use to distil the message down to the core.

2. Let them know the reasons behind the decision or information - be honest about what you do and don’t know.

3. Let them know how you feel and your motives - you are a human being delivering a message to another human being.

4. It’s not about you - conveying the message is primarily about them, so don’t make it about you.

5. Acknowledge the emotions - that the news is likely to impact them, and that’s perfectly understandable.

6. Check in for understanding - ask them to share the news in their own words and clarify anything that isn’t clear.

7. Commit to supporting them - let them know that you’re here to help.

8. Look after yourself - sharing bad news can knock you around, so find others who can support you.

If we follow each of these steps, we’re in a much better position to deliver negative news in a way where people can hear it, process it, and then seek additional support.

Reference

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/05/08/shooting-the-messenger-is-a-psychological-reality-share-bad-news-and-people-will-like-you-less/

Episode 37 - Why Everyone is a Born Leader

Summary

This week we explore why everyone is a born leader - that we all have a head start in some facet of leadership.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 37 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are exploring why everyone is a born leader.

I was just about to give a presentation at a conference recently when someone said “I see you’re talking about leadership today - don’t you think leaders are born?”

My answer, having had over 20 years to research and think about it, might surprise you. The answer is yes - I do think leaders are born. But probably not in the way you expect.

When most people think about ‘born leaders’ they’re usually thinking about things like charisma, confidence, and extraversion - those up front skills that draw others in and create enthusiasm. The reality is that some people have a head start in these areas through genetics and the environment in which they grow up, so you might consider them to be born leaders. But these skills and traits are just part of effective leadership. In fact, not every great leader is charismatic, confident and extraverted. There are many different ways to be an effective leader. Research into leadership and Emotional Intelligence highlights a suite of competencies that can help people to be great leaders, each of which can be learned and developed.

I recall an interview with Daniel Goleman, whose books on Emotional Intelligence helped popularise the concept in the 1990s and beyond. Goleman was asked what he thought about Steve Jobs as a leader, and whether Jobs had great emotional intelligence. Now, this was a loaded question, particularly since Jobs had only just passed away earlier that same year. Jobs was clearly a very successful leader who transformed the way we think about technology, music distribution and even animated movies. But he was also renowned for being extremely demanding to the point of being aggressive, often belittling people in front of others. In fact, his close friend and Apple designer Jony Ive described it like this: “I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, 'But I don't stay mad.' He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and licence to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.” That doesn’t sound very emotionally intelligent.

But Goleman drew out Job’s vision and inspirational leadership - his ability to come up with new ways of thinking and bring people around that vision. You only have to watch the launch on the first iPhone to see these strengths in full display. Goleman also pointed out that emotional intelligence is a spectrum of abilities, and that you don’t have to be great at all of them to be great as a leader.

In fact, great leadership can be built on empathy and insight into others. Or resilience and the ability to bounce back quickly from setbacks. Or warmth and the ability to connect with others. Or analytical capacity - being able to pull things apart into their component parts. Or conceptual ability - being able to link disparate ideas into a unified whole. Once we broaden out the list of capabilities associated with success as a leader, you start to recognise that we all have a head start in at least a few areas. That we are all born leaders in our own way.

When I’m facilitating I often ask groups to repeat some statements about leadership. There’s something powerful about a group of 50 or 100 people all saying the same thing. The two statements that have the biggest impact are “Anyone can become a great leader” and “The best leader you can be is yourself.” This week I challenge you to think of yourself as a born leader, with just as much capacity and potential for great leadership as anyone else.

Episode 36 - Four Steps to Building a Legacy of Leaders

Summary

Leadership isn’t just what you do in the moment - it’s the legacy you leave. This week we look at four steps to building a legacy of leaders.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 36 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at four steps to building a legacy of leaders.

Leadership isn’t just what you do in the moment - it’s the legacy you leave. In fact, the most effective leaders create a lasting legacy in people - they create more leaders. The effectiveness of a leader is best measured at least 5 to 10 years further on. Great leadership takes time - there aren’t many quick wins. It’s best to think of leadership as a long-term investment.

I recently spoke at a conference in Malaysia with a group of Doctors, mainly heads of departments in major hospitals from around the world, on this very topic. Hospitals are a tricky environment in which to identify and develop leaders - there’s time pressure, people spreading their hours across multiple hospitals, highly technical work - lots of things to grapple with. Perhaps you have similar pressures in your environment as well. But there are still steps we can take to make progress.

There are four things each of us can do to build a legacy of leaders:

1. Build Understanding - develop a clear and shared view of what ‘great leadership’ looks like in your context. People have often had poor experiences of leadership or have a limited view of what leadership is - that it’s about bossing people around or being taken away from the work that I enjoy. In workshops I ask people to share examples of great leadership. I’m always impressed by the range of answers given. The exercise helps people to understand that leadership isn’t one thing, and that people can be effective leaders in many different ways. That the best way to lead is firstly to be yourself. This helps people to broaden their view of what leadership looks like, and consider whether leadership may, in fact, be for them. That anyone can be a great leader - we all have something to bring and capabilities that we can develop.

2. Explore Aspiration - it’s essential to have development discussions to explore a person’s level of interest in leadership. I worked with a large organisation that had identified hundreds of people in a leadership high potential pool. But the people didn’t know they were in the high potential pool. It was all too common for someone from the pool to be tapped on the shoulder and offered a leadership role, but they had no interest in leadership. No one had even asked them if they aspired to a leadership position. Exploring aspirations makes a real difference.

3. Develop Capability - allow opportunities for practise, feedback and coaching. This can include step up, secondment and project opportunities, but with focused development attached. I’m a big fan of monthly one-on-one meetings that include discussion around an individual’s development. And you don’t need to do all the capability development yourself. You can help them to find mentors both within and outside the organisation that can focus on specific areas they’re interested in developing.

4. Provide Capacity - people need time to develop leadership capability, and this needs to be factored into the job design. A great question for discussion is how much time a person should have each week for leading others versus personally delivering work. Now I know you can’t necessarily carve out specific activities as pure leadership, but it intrigues me when people provide really low numbers - like 3 or 4 hours a week. A study in Harvard Business Review found CEOs spent between 32% to 67% of their time with their direct reports. In fact, they spent more time with their direct reports when they had greater confidence in them. Other research suggested each employee should have around 6 hours a week interacting with their leader to maximise engagement, rising to 10 or even 20 hours for innovation focused work. And increased face to face time with their leader saw a dramatic reduction in the volume of emails they sent and received. This data also suggests each leader should have a cap of around seven direct reports to be most effective - beyond that, the leader can’t dedicate enough time to leading people.

I encourage you to spend some time this week considering your own legacy as a leader, and how you can create even more leaders who can multiply your efforts and impact.

References

https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-leaders-calendar

https://www.fastcompany.com/3032972/why-managers-should-spend-exactly-6-hours-a-week-with-each-employee

Episode 35 - Managing Your Time in an Infinite Job

Summary

Most of us have what I call infinite jobs - where we could just keep working more hours and never quite get everything done. This week we look at practical ways to manage infinite jobs, improving our productivity while also regaining control over our hours.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 35 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at practical ways to manage infinite jobs - improving our productivity while also regaining control over our hours.

There are two types of jobs - what I call finite jobs and infinite jobs. Chances are at some point in your career you’ve had a finite job - one where you had set work hours, and were paid for every hour you worked. For example, retail jobs are typically finite jobs - you start your shift at a particular time, complete as much work as you can during your shift, then walk away at the end of your shift. Whatever work was left over is either there for you the next day, or handed across to someone else. And there’s no expectation to work beyond the hours you’re given - remember those days? In this environment, leaders assess the overall workload and determine the resources needed to deliver. If more work needs to be done, more resources are allocated.

Infinite jobs are quite different. These jobs have objectives to deliver - some being set up front, and some which emerge over time. Here you’re not really paid by the hour. Your contract may specify that you’re employed to work 38 or 40 hours, but you’re really employed to deliver results. Contracts might refer to ‘reasonable overtime’ or something similar. Or you might be running your own business, where you just work the hours you need to deliver results. Infinite jobs are different because there isn’t an end point. You could potentially keep working more and more hours and never ‘finish’ an infinite job. There’s always more you could do - more clients to contact, more processes to improve, more development of people to undertake. The vast majority of leadership roles are infinite jobs, so chances are you’re currently in an infinite job. And more finite jobs are either being automated or converted into infinite jobs. The reality of the modern workplace is that more and more of our work will not have a natural end point.

So how do you manage an infinite job? I remember when I first took on a leadership role. I had worked as a management consultant, so was pretty familiar with having an infinite job, but was able to manage my time reasonably well despite the high demands. But nothing had prepared me for leadership. My work hours began to increase. I started with a bit over 45 hours a week, but found it quickly rose to 50 hours, then 55, then 60 plus. I was getting into work earlier and earlier to try to get something done before my team arrived, then worked later and later to catch up on things at the end of the day. Then I would log in again after dinner, finding myself swapping instant messages with the rest of the leadership team until late at night, before crawling into bed and starting it all over again the next day. I felt exhausted and dissatisfied, and there was still more to do. When the weekend rolled around I’d sleep for much of Saturday morning and try to recover in time for Monday, but would find myself gradually become more and more worn down. 

Eventually it dawned on me that there actually wasn’t an end point to my job. There was never going to be a point where, as a leader, I could say “I’m finished” or “job done”. In fact, the more hours of work I completed, the more work I generated for myself and others. I wasn’t even approaching completion - even though I was hitting all my targets, I was pushing completion even further down the road. There was an ever-present level of stress and dissatisfaction - a constant worry that I was missing something or had more to do. Maybe you can relate to my experience - and maybe you’re in the middle of it right now. The key lesson for me from this experience was we can’t manage an infinite job by just adding more and more hours to our work week. We need to change the way we think about and manage our work.

A framework you’re probably familiar with involves thinking about our work in terms of the Important versus Urgent - basically that every task we complete can be thought of in terms of how important it is, and how urgent it is. While he wasn’t the first to think of this framework, Steven Covey popularised it in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. Even 30 years on this book is still worth a read. Covey highlighted that we tend to get caught up in urgent work, and don’t prioritise important work enough. Clearly, if something is both urgent and important, then we should tackle that deadline, crisis or emergency straight away. But much of our time is spent with seemingly urgent but not important tasks which we should delegate to others. And we definitely need to get rid of the not urgent and not important distractions that soak up our time. But the other category - the not urgent but important - is what most leaders end up neglecting. This can include planning, reflection, long term development, networking and relationship building, creative thinking - all the things that so often get pushed aside in an infinite job. So how do we make sure we have time to do this important work, while also making our infinite job a little more finite?

Here’s an approach you might want to try:

1. Determine your ideal work hours. For most people you should aim to reduce what you’re doing at the moment, but why not start with around 40 hours as a target. A company called Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand experimented with people working four eight-hour days a week but being paid for five. Aside from the numerous benefits to individuals, they actually saw an overall productivity increase - people completed more in 32 hours than they used to complete in 40 hours. People came up with all sorts of creative ways to be more productive in their infinite jobs. We will fill whatever hours we set, so take this moment to reset.

2. Use your calendar to schedule everything - and I mean everything. This includes putting things in your calendar that unexpectedly come up so you have a record at the end of the week of how you’ve actually spent your time.

3. Identify your priorities and schedule the not urgent but important work for when you’re at your best. Each of us has a time in the day when we’re best at focused work, and that’s where the important but not urgent work should sit.

4. Schedule in breaks - at least three if not four per day. Actual get up, go for a walk, chat with someone else - take at least 10 to 15 minutes to re-engergise and refresh. You will be amazed how much more productive you are with some well-placed breaks every 90 minutes.

5. Leave time for the inevitable urgent and important activities - leave blank periods in your schedule. It’s tempting to schedule every minute then be disappointed when other things come up. I recommend trying to leave an hour or two per day for most people, but it could vary depending on your job. 

6. Be ruthless when it comes to meetings - if there isn’t a clear purpose, agenda and role for you, don’t go. Sure, you might need to negotiate that, but if you’re spending more than a couple of hours per day in meetings, you’re unlikely to be performing at your best.

The beauty of this approach is that you’ve set the overall number of hours, and you can’t be doing two things at once. So if you’ve filled your calendar and something else comes up, you need to get rid of or reschedule something else. You’ve effectively made your job finite by setting your work hours. 

Now, you might ask, what if I can’t get everything done in those hours? Well, now your calendar is evidence of your overall workload which will help when negotiating additional resources or a change in accountabilities. Just like those employees in New Zealand, you’ll be amazed at how creative you can get when you make your job more finite.

Reference:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/work-less-get-more-new-zealand-firms-four-day-week-an-unmitigated-success

Episode 34 - Moving from Stressed to Strong

Summary

Nearly half of all employees often experience negative work-related stress, flowing through to lower levels of engagement and motivation. As leaders, we can dramatically reduce this figure, and transform the performance of individuals and our organisations.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 34 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at how leaders can move their people from ‘stressed’ to ‘strong’.

Negative work-related stress takes a significant toll on individuals and the organisations for which they work. My recent research with over 1,400 not for profit leaders and employees reveals 46% of people report often experiencing negative work-related stress – a group I call “The Stressed”. Furthermore, 80% see their work as demanding – a group I call “The Stretched”. 

The experience of these two groups is quite different. Those who often experience negative work-related stress have 17% lower employee engagement ratings compared to the rest - “The Stressed” are less likely to be engaged with their work and organisation than others. And this negative sentiment is reflected in all aspects of employee engagement, particularly in a 24% lower rating of their likelihood to recommend their organisation to others as a place to work.  

In contrast, those who find their work demanding have 21% higher employee engagement than those who don’t see their work as demanding. “The Stretched” are much more likely to be engaged with their work and their organisation. This group’s level of motivation to do their best work for the organisation is particularly notable, being 29% higher than the rest of the people surveyed. 

However, there is overlap between these two groups. It’s possible to be both “Stressed” and “Stretched”, or any other combination of these two factors. 

In the research I separated out those who find their work demanding, but don’t often experience negative work-related stress – a group I call “The Strong”. This 38% of employees report 34% higher levels of employee engagement than the rest of those surveyed. Their ratings of whether they would recommend their organisation to others as a place to work are 40% higher than others. They’re much more likely to be motivated to do their best work for the organisation, and are also more likely to want to stay with the organisation. The positive impact of being amongst “The Strong” flows through to all elements of employee engagement.

This raises an important question – what is different about the experience of individuals that might account for these dramatically different outcomes in employee engagement? 

It turns out that “The Stressed” provide particularly poor ratings of the level of autonomy they have in how they achieve outcomes, being 21% lower than the rest of those surveyed. Their ratings of the opportunity to develop capability in areas that are important to them are 17% lower than others. This is consistent with broader research into stress at work – a lack of autonomy and capability to do your job well is a recipe for negative stress.

In contrast, “The Stretched” are 32% more likely to see their work as contributing to a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. This sense of purpose appears to buffer people from the adverse impocts of negative stress, helping the individual to interpret challenges and demands in a more positive light. It’s much easier to see a demanding job as a good thing if you believe you are making a positive impact on something that matters. The ability to develop meaningful connections at work also appears to help, with “The Stretched” rating this 24% higher than others.

“The Strong” have particularly positive ratings of purpose, development, connections and autonomy. These four work environment factors are also significantly positively correlated with employee engagement. Each of these factors individually accounts for 28% to 40% of the variance in employee engagement.

For leaders the message is clear. We need to provide a clear and compelling direction first. We then need to provide development opportunities so people are equiped and confident to tackle their work. Thirdly, we need to connect our people with others that can support them and with whom they can collaborate. And, lastly, we need to delegate the authority to our people to act, providing them with the autonomy they need.

As leaders we have a unique opportunity to turn “The Stressed” into “The Strong”, and to create a work environment where everyone can bring their best and flourish. This isn’t just great for our people, it’s also great for our organisations and those we serve.

Episode 33 - The Problem with Solving Problems

Summary

The problem with solving problems is that we often rush towards solutions without spending enough time clearly identifying the challenge we’re facing. In this episode we explore the power of a well crafted problem statement.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 33 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at the problem with solving problems - that we often rush towards solutions without spending enough time clearly identifying the challenge we’re facing.

There’s a quote typically attributed to Albert Einstein that goes along the lines of “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” Now, there’s not great evidence that Einstein ever uttered those words, but there is still a great deal of truth in them. We often rush into solution mode when we’ve only partially, or even incorrectly, identified the problem we’re trying to solve.

I’ve spent around half of my career working in management consulting focusing on complex problems and solutions. Over that time I lost count of the number of times I heard the classic attempted put down - “consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time, then charge you for it”. Of course, if you ask a consultant to tell you the time while you’re wearing a watch, then maybe the consultant isn’t the problem. Either way, it highlights that organisations often outsource solution generation, and are then frustrated when the expensive solutions don’t quite hit the mark. I believe this is often because the problem isn’t clearly and accurately identified, so people end up frantically working towards solving the wrong problem. Once the problem is clear, organisations are usually pretty good at developing and implementing solutions.

I shared an example in the last episode of a person who inherited a task to prepare a series of reports. Preparing all of these reports was arduous and took 8 hours to complete - it was a real problem for him as he struggled to get the rest of his work completed in the rest of the week. He initially identified the problem as “these reports take too long to complete”, and so came up with and implemented improvements that meant he could prepare the reports in just four hours. But there was a deeper question that needed answering - “why are these reports needed?” It turned out people weren’t actually using the reports - no one really needed the reports to be generated, and so he took an eight hour task and reduced it to zero. The problem to explore was around the need for the reports, not the efficiency of report production.

It’s hard to identify the real problem when you’re in the middle of it, but using a clear structure and approach can help. It might even save you from using a consultant or, at least, make your investment in an external consultant more valuable.

We need to start by trying to identify the root cause of the problem. I’ve talked about using the “5 whys” approach in episode 20 - repeatedly asking the question “why?” to step back towards the root cause. 

Once we think we’re close to the root cause, a structured problem statement can help. It provides some rigour around identifying the problem and its impact, while also making it easier to communicate the problem to others, and assess the value of various proposed solutions. 

One simple structure for a problem statement includes four elements:

1. Ideal scenario – what it would be like if this problem didn’t exist

2. Current situation – what it is currently like - the current reality

3. Consequences – the implications for this audience if we do nothing - can help build momentum towards change

4. Focus – the areas we will explore to solve the problem

Here’s an example of applying that approach to a business that’s struggling to have sufficient stock in stores.

• Ideal - We want our customers to be able to easily purchase our products with an emphasis on experience and convenience.

• Current - Our most loyal customers are complaining that their local stores are often out of stock of our most popular products, so they’re forced to phone ahead or drive around to other stores looking for stock.

• Consequences - We are losing sales and frustrating our customers, leaving ourselves open to them switching to competitor products.

• Focus - To address this problem, we are going to explore three elements. The first being the reliability of transport of product from our warehouse to stores. The second - building our capacity to track current stock levels at stores. And thirdly, explore our ability to provide stock to customers directly via a new home delivery channel.

Now it’s important to also be responsive. Sometimes as we are seeking to solve the problem, we come across further information which may further clarify the problem. You can always refine the problem statement to reflect this new information.

Episode 32 - When Working Smarter Isn't The Smartest Way To Work

Summary

We’ve all heard the mantra - work smarter, not harder. But sometimes our idea of ‘smarter’ still isn’t the smartest way to work. We need to reflect on an entirely different level. 

Transcript

Welcome to episode 32 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at the importance of taking time to reflect and challenge the work we’re conducting.

We’ve all heard the mantra - work smarter, not harder. But sometimes our idea of ‘smarter’ still isn’t the smartest way to work. It’s quite possible to very efficiently completely miss the point, overlooking an opportunity to see things from an entirely new perspective. This is particularly a risk in high-paced, busy environments. 

Chris Argyris wrote a classic Harvard Business Review article in 1977 called “Double Loop Learning in Organizations”. In the article, Chris provided the example of an organisation that had a dud product, which was eventually discontinued. But those closest to production knew years in advance of the problems. However not all the information about the product’s issues were passed upwards (neither was this information sought out from those in decision making positions). The bad news was watered down. The delay in cancelling the product cost the organisation greatly. Chris highlighted this as a classic example of an organisation failing to learn. People ended up not questioning the work that was being done, but merely trying to streamline it. He saw them using single loop instead of double loop learning. 

Let’s use an example to describe what Chris meant by single and double loop learning.  Let’s say I’m working on a project, and I notice that we’re starting to fall behind schedule - the project is slipping. One option is to work harder - just put in more hours to try to bring the project back to the original schedule. In this approach, we’re looking at the challenge from an ‘action - result’ perspective. To try to change the result, the only lever we can use is to do more of the action. We haven’t actually learnt anything. Chris would call this ‘zero loop learning’. There is no feedback loop between the result that has changed the action, beyond increasing the amount of action.

A second option to address the slipping project is to work smarter. Here we notice the project is slipping, so we spend some time planning our approach. This could lead us to change our action - maybe we can streamline a process, or negotiate a change in the delivery date, or change the mix of resources on the project. This single loop from action back to planning may well help. We have learnt something and improved our approach to the project, so that’s a good thing, right? Of course it is - but is it the best course of action? Argyris described this as single loop learning - the gap to performance expectations loops back to a planning step that isn’t present in zero loop learning. This is likely to lead to some improvement, and it is where many people and organisations stop.  

Double-loop learning is a completely new way of looking at the issue with the project. Instead of just working harder or smarter, we’re asking ourselves a new question - is it the right work? The double-loop takes us another step back from the project to explore our assumptions. What is the project trying to achieve? Why is this important? If we could start all over again, what other approaches could we use to address this need? It’s getting outside the work, and reflecting on bigger questions. It’s also about taking personal responsibility. Chris Argyris wrote a great follow up article in 1991 called “Teaching Smart People How to Learn”, again in Harvard Business Review. In it he described the work he had performed in management consulting firms, and the tendency for consultants and managers to blame their clients when projects didn’t deliver the expected outcomes. Consultants were quite happy to work on helping clients to learn and improve, but tended not to step back and think about how they could improve. Their focus on improving the performance of clients didn’t extend to themselves. When you don’t step back, the tendency is to blame others. The assumption is that you are approaching the client work well, so any performance issues are related to the client’s inability to learn. It reminded me of a financial institution I once worked with, where senior leaders would often talk negatively about customers. One senior leader regularly joked “this place would run much better if we didn’t have any customers”. Is it any surprise that the failed to see changes in the market and ultimately lost customers? After all, that’s what they jokingly wanted.

When I shared the double-loop learning framework in a leadership program, one of the participants shared a story. They had been spending eight hours a week producing a series of reports, drawing data from various sources, and then distributing these reports to various people across the organisation. It’s what their predecessor had done, so was handed across to them as a task to complete. By using their knowledge of Excel, they managed to streamline the report preparation process, reducing it down to around half a day - a great example of single-loop learning. But they never received any feedback about the reports. So they sent an email out to the recipients - how do you use these reports, can I make them more helpful? No response. So they decided to stop producing the reports. Guess what happened - absolutely nothing. It turned out that no one was actually using the reports any more. So they ultimately improved their efficiency by 20% and bought themselves an extra day to focus on things that really mattered. So many people would have stopped at the single-loop step of developing a more efficient way to produce the reports, instead of stepping back and asking what the reports were for, and whether they were needed.

To make double-loop learning work we need a few things in place:

• Permission to question the approach - testing the assumptions is actually valued and actively solicited

• A culture that values feedback, even when it’s negative or critical, as long as the focus is on improvement

• Time to reflect on our approach - so many of us are hyper-busy with no time to reflect - reflection is never going to make it into the ‘important and urgent’ quadrant, so we need to schedule this reflection time in

• Take a wider view - what’s happening in other organisations, industries, professions, countries - read widely

References

Chris Argyris - Double Loop Learning in Organizations - Harvard Business Review 1977 - https://hbr.org/1977/09/double-loop-learning-in-organizations

Chris Argyris - Teaching Smart People How To Learn - Harvard Business Review 1991 - https://hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn

Episode 31 - Limiting Thoughts - Taming Your Own Worst Critic

Summary

In this episode we look at ways to retrain our own worst critic - the automatic limiting thoughts that enter our minds when we are faced with challenges, and that hold us back from opportunities.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 31 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we are looking at ways to retrain our own worst critic - the automatic limiting thoughts that enter our minds when we are faced with challenges, and that hold us back from opportunities.

Have you ever had someone in your life that was continually negative and critical? Always chipping away, complaining, pointing out faults, highlighting risks? Did they hold you back from thinking more positively, from trying new things, from taking action? If you did have someone in your life like that, you probably either pointed out those tendencies to them, or simply spent more time with positive people.

For many people, the most negative and critical voice in their life is the one inside their head - those automatic limiting thoughts that enter our conscious mind when we’re faced with a challenge or hit with a set back. The thoughts are automatic because they arrive without any conscious effort. And they are limiting because they hold us back from the potential positives of taking a different course of action. 

The human brain works really hard to join dots - to discover patterns and meaning behind the wealth of information constantly rushing in from outside and from within ourselves. The thoughts that enter our conscious mind are ideas providing one possible explanation for what we’re interpreting. As we saw in the self-fulfilling prophecy episode, these thoughts and beliefs can be so powerful that they actually shape events and people around us. If we think someone doesn’t like us, we can act in a way that will lead that person to like us less. And so the limiting thought is reinforced and strengthened.

The human brain is also a risk management machine - we’re wired to notice threats. While you hear this sentence, your brain is scanning the environment for threats multiple times. This feature of our brain can also exaggerate the risk of taking action, leading us to magnify the risks and minimise the potential rewards. That’s why most people will work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain an extra dollar. We are often working out of a mindset of risk and potential loss.

I was recently coaching a person who was very nervous about public presentations. In fact they said “If I have to give a presentation to the rest of the team, I will die”. Now, on one level, “I will die” was just a turn of phrase. But, on another level, it was actually how they physically responded to upcoming presentations. They thought, felt and acted like there was an imminent threat to their life which, of course, there wasn’t. I worked with them to challenge and then change their interpretation of presentations. First we started by challenging the automatic thought. How did the team respond to other presentations in the past? It turns out they were usually quite supportive. Then we considered some alternative explanations. Perhaps they felt physically worked up about the presentation because they wanted to do a good job and it mattered to them. Then we simply changed the script - choosing an alternate thought that they were excited about the presentation. When you’re excited your heart rate might increase, you might get a little sweaty, you might even stumble over some words. But excitement is much more positive than nervousness. It’s the same physiology, but a very different mindset. Having your heart race made sense as an indicator of excitement - they didn’t need to interpret it as a warning sign. In fact, presentations could actually be a great opportunity to practice and improve their public speaking. So the presentation to the team became an exciting opportunity, instead of a life threatening risk. 

Retraining your own worst critic initially takes conscious effort, but over time we can create new and more positive automatic thoughts. The only way to get more comfortable and confident with public speaking is to do lots of public speaking. The new mindset, that presentations are an exciting opportunity to get better at presenting, encouraged them to do more presentations. 

Here are some ways to tackle our limiting thoughts, and retrain our inner critic:

1. Notice your automatic thoughts. Write them down in a journal or using a notes app on your phone. That will give you a sense of what you’re telling yourself through the day.

2. See thoughts as opinions, not facts. Assess whether each automatic thought is rational, true and helpful. Incorporate other information. Craft other potential explanations. Try to identify the most likely explanation.

3. Avoid catastrophic language - “I’ll just die”, “this always happens to me”, “I’ll never get any better at this”. This just escalates the impact of the negative thought.

4. Play the scenario out - realise that, even if the worst case comes true, you’ll still be okay.

5. Rewrite the script - just like I did with the person I was coaching, changing “nervous” to “excited”. We can change the interpretation we place on our automatic thoughts and the cues from our body.

By applying these approaches we can retrain our own worst critic to become much more focused on positive opportunities than paralysed by risks.

Episode 30 - Making Negative Feedback a Little Less Negative

Summary

Commentary around the effectiveness of negative feedback is mixed, with people often highlighting the adverse impact that it can have on individuals. But is there a way to make negative feedback, well, less negative?

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 30 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re exploring how to make negative feedback a little less negative.

Commentary around the effectiveness of negative feedback is mixed, with people often highlighting the adverse impact that it can have on individuals. This has led some to recommend that leaders should avoid providing negative feedback altogether. A less extreme recommendation is typically to provide much more positive feedback than negative feedback, which makes a lot of sense. We should put a lot more effort into guiding people towards an objective, rather than correcting them for straying from the path. But is there a way to make negative feedback, well, less negative?

Let’s step outside the business context for a moment, and into the world of friendships. Recent research has shown that as a friendship deepens, the friends seek and provide more negative feedback to each other. In contrast, the deepening friendship doesn’t lead to an increase or decrease in the amount of positive feedback provided. It seems that the depth of the connection allows negative feedback to play a more constructive role in the relationship. The friendship becomes a safe place where people can provide and receive candid feedback to help each other improve. 

So what’s the difference between positive and negative feedback. One simple distinction is that positive feedback seeks to recognise and reinforce a behaviour. In contrast negative feedback seeks to identify a behaviour that should be reduced or changed.

As we covered in an earlier episode, one way to make feedback more effective is to focus on the behaviour demonstrated, and the impact of that behaviour on you and others. But what other conditions are specific to making negative feedback work? How do we make it more like the negative feedback close friends seek and provide to each other?

Two pieces of research provide helpful insight into making negative feedback more constructive. The first is a very recent meta analysis of 78 studies into the impact of negative feedback on intrinsic motivation. The second study looked specifically at the factors that moderate an employees reaction to negative feedback. Taken together, these two studies highlight four important principles when we need to provide negative feedback. 

1. Connection matters - much like in the earlier research about negative feedback in friendships, the closer the connection, the more effective the negative feedback. And face to face feedback works best. This allows a much richer conversation that factors in the subtle non verbal cues so important in communication.

2. Your motivation matters - being considerate makes a difference. This could mean acknowledging that the feedback is difficult to give, but that you really want the person to develop and improve. In fact, you wouldn’t be providing the feedback unless you cared about the person’s development and progress.

3. Quality matters - negative feedback works best when it is data and criteria based. This could involve highlighting how the negative behaviour is adversely impacting on performance measures for the role, and how the desired behaviour will help the individual. 

4. Guidance matters - the research demonstrated that negative feedback was more effective when there was clear guidance about how to improve. Such guidance helps demonstrate that you are willing to support the individual’s development. 

Most people don’t enjoy giving or receiving negative feedback, but if delivered well using these four principles it can be an important driver of further development. So as a final reminder, connection matters, your motivation matters, quality matters, and guidance matters. 

I hope you found this episode helpful. As always, please recommend the podcast to a friend or colleague. And you can get in touch via the leadership.today website if you have any thoughts or feedback on the episode. See you next week!

Research

A Meta-Analysis of Negative Feedback on Intrinsic Motivation. Fong, Carlton J; Patall, Erika A; Vasquez, Ariana C; Stautberg, Sandra. Educational Psychology Review; New York Vol. 31, Iss. 1,  (Mar 2019): 121-162.

Moderators of employee reactions to negative feedback. Steelman, Lisa A; Rutkowski, Kelly A. Journal of Managerial Psychology; Bradford Vol. 19, Iss. 1/2,  (2004): 6-18.

When friends exchange negative feedback. Finkelstein, Stacey R; Fishbach, Ayelet; Tu, Yanping. Motivation and Emotion; New York Vol. 41, Iss. 1,  (Feb 2017): 69-83

Episode 29 - Chronotypes and the Perils of Working 9 to 5

Summary

Working 9 to 5 may not be the best way for everyone to maximise their productivity. In this episode we look at the science of chronotypes, and how leaders can use our natural sleep/wake cycles to get the best out of their people. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 29 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. Today we are talking about chronotypes and the perils of working 9 to 5. 

As you wade into research about patterns in daily productivity, focus and sleep, you find a wealth of information, often confusing and sometimes contradictory. So let’s start with the basics. Chronotypes are used to categorise people based on their sleep/wake cycles across a 24 hour period. There are three main chronotypes - morning, intermediate and evening types. These follow a normal distribution, so 50% of people are classed as intermediate types. But even these intermediate types can have a preference towards morning or evening. 

Your chronotype impacts when you best exercise, concentrate, eat and sleep - it’s not just a learned preference, it has a biological basis. Hormones are part of that biological basis. For example, the hormone melatonin starts being produced in greater levels by the pineal gland as a person approaches sleep, it peaks during the night, and then more rapidly declines towards waking time. Another hormone, cortisol, follows an opposing pattern - rising as morning approaches, peaking later in the morning, then tapering off towards evening. Cortisol is typically classed as a stress hormone, and you’ve probably only heard bad things about it. But, in moderation, it has a number of positive benefits relating to concentration, energy levels, and positive mood.

Peaks in melatonin typically vary by around four hours between morning and evening types.  A morning type could have a melatonin level at 7pm that an evening type doesn’t reach until 11pm. Some research has even seen ranges in melatonin peaks of up to ten hours. You can imagine the impact of forcing morning and evening types to go to sleep or wake at the same time. Yet so often our business hours are a compromise between these two types - 9 to 5.

I’m definitely a morning person, and that has become even clearer now I have greater flexibility over my day. This morning preference has also become more pronounced as I age, but more on that soon.

In contrast, I remember a participant on a leadership program with a quite different chronotype to me. She really struggled with the program’s 8.30am start time, which was an hour earlier than when she usually got to work. She wasn’t particularly sharp in the morning. While others were asking questions and engaging in activities, this participant took a while to warm up. However, at the very point when most people were fading in the afternoon, this person came into their own - they were asking questions, engaging with activities and were much more physically animated. 

During a break I asked what her perfect work day would look like if she had absolute freedom to choose. It turns out her perfect work day would be 11am to 7.30pm. In fact she had even suggested these work hours to her manager. This would allow her to get up around 9.30am, and still have time to get to the gym before work. But most of her fellow team members were working 8.30am to 5pm, and her manager thought an 11am start would be too extreme. They ended up negotiating a compromise of 9.30am to 6pm, but it was common for her to work an extra hour or two at the end of the agreed work day when she felt particularly sharp and focused. Interestingly she did work her preferred hours when she worked from home - no one noticed any difference and she felt great. I wonder how much those compromised hours are costing her and the business. 

The impact of having people working outside their preferred hours is much like crossing time zones - having to wake consistently earlier, or later than our natural biological rhythms. This wreaks havoc on our bodies and health. Even one hour shifts for daylight saving changes mess with our biological clocks, and you can even see the impact of that in mental health and crime statistics.

Sleep wake cycles are also linked to age. Teenagers need more sleep, and tend to shift towards later sleep and wake times, achieving what’s known as “peak lateness” at 19 years old. Given this, the optimal school day for most teenagers should start around 10am or even later. As we age, we tend to shift more towards the morning. For example, men on average shift from evening to morning types around 40 years of age. So older workers may prefer an earlier start, but there is a very broad distribution of preferences at any age. 

As a leader there are a number of ways in which we can take chronotypes into account to support both individuals and the business:

1. Ask individuals - if they could pick their perfect work hours, what would they be? It’s important to not set up an expectation that you can automatically provide these hours, but it’s a great question to gain additional information that could impact rosters and work times. 

2. Assess and raise awareness about chronotypes - The Center for Environmental Therapeutics has an online version of the often-used Morning Evening Questionnaire (or MEQ) which can help people to identify their chronotype. I’ve included a link to the questionnaire in the show notes (http://www.cet-surveys.com/index.php?sid=61524).

3. Provide flexibility - encourage people to trial different work hours when they are working at home. Just be aware that, like jet lag, it takes a few days to adjust into a new rhythm. 

4. Communicate - like any other diversity in the workplace, there is a risk of misunderstanding. Make sure you communicate when people are trialing new hours so people don’t think the other types are being lazy by either leaving earlier or arriving later than usual. 

5. Focus on outputs - measure what people deliver, not how long it takes them or the process. This will provide people with greater flexibility over how they produce results. 

And chronotypes aren’t just about how you lead others, they’re also important for managing yourself. Here are some things to try if you’re struggling with your sleep/wake cycle:

1. Complete the assessment - find out what your preferred chronotype is.

2. Negotiate work time experiments. Sometimes managers are concerned about making large changes and what that might mean for them and the team they manage. Turning this into experiments may give them more confidence. Even if your new work hours are a complete failure, they can always change back. 

3. Go with consistent sleep times - go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. It makes a huge difference in really establishing those rhythms.

4. Make sure you get plenty of light in the morning and not much at night - get outdoors in the morning so your brain and body can synch with sunlight cues, and avoid screens at night. In winter consider bright lights in morning and dimmer lighting in the evenings.

5. Sleep is really tightly linked with diet and exercise, so improvements in these will also help the quality of our sleep.  

6. Read up - there are two really interesting books that I highly recommend around these topics:

   • Why we sleep: The new science of sleep and dreams. By Matthew Walker. It includes some fascinating science, and there’s a particularly great narrator on the audio book - in fact I’ve fallen asleep while listening to that book on more than one flight.

   • When: The scientific secrets of perfect timing. By Daniel Pink. Daniel has a fantastic ability to consolidate a broad range of scientific research together with entertaining stories focused on decision making and chronotypes.

Well I hope you found the content in this episode helpful. As always it would be great if you could share the podcast with your friends and work colleagues, and please make contact via the leadership.today website if you have any feedback or questions. See you next week. 

Research

Find out your type by taking the Morning Evening Questionnaire by the Center for Environmental Therapeutics: http://www.cet-surveys.com/index.php?sid=61524 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868668/ - Emotion. 2016 Jun; 16(4): 431–435.

Published online 2016 Mar 7. Positive upshots of cortisol in everyday life

Lindsay T. Hoyt,1,* Katharine H. Zeiders,2 Katherine B. Ehrlich,3 and Emma K. Adam3,4,*

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-land-nod/201301/changing-night-owl-lark

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178782

Episode 28 - How Leaders Create an Environment Where People Thrive

Summary

How do leaders create an environment where people thrive? This week we look at the importance of leadership styles in helping to bring out the best in our people.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 28 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re looking at how leaders create an environment where people thrive, which is building on some of the themes from last week’s episode.

When I was 15 my first part time job was at a large retailer. My job title was ‘Customer Service Security’, which sounds pretty impressive, but in practice that meant I was the person who checked bags as people left the store to make sure they hadn’t stolen anything. At that time the retailer had a garden department with its own street entrance, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to come in the main entrance, steal something, then try to make a quick escape through the garden department. Of course they had to get past Customer Service Security first. By any measure, this wasn’t a great job to give to a 15 year old, but it was character building if nothing else. Another of my responsibilities was to help people who were returning goods, checking their receipts and passing them through to a person who could give them a refund. 

There’s one refund that has stuck in my mind 30 years after the event. A man came into the garden department one Saturday morning carrying what looked like a stick with a black plastic bag on one end. He let me know that he wanted a full cash refund on the item. I looked at the receipt, and what he had originally purchased a full three months earlier was a bare-rooted lemon tree. You see occasionally had specials where we would sell a bunch of young trees with minimal soil around the roots which were then sealed in a plastic bag - which made it much easier than shipping and selling them than putting them in pots. But this guy had bought the bare-rooted lemon tree, taken it home and put it in his garage for a full three months - no sunlight, no water, no nutrients, no space to grow. It didn’t take a horticultural qualification to realise the lemon tree was dead. Amazingly, our generous refund policy meant the man left with a full refund, and we were left wondering what to do with a dead stick in a bag.

There are a few important leadership principles wrapped up in this story. The most obvious one is that, as leaders, we need to create an environment where people can thrive. Just like the lemon tree needed to be planted in good soil, with access to sunlight, water and nutrients to thrive, as leaders we need to provide an environment where people can thrive. I’ll talk more about how we can do that shortly.

The second equally important principle is that we can’t force people to be motivated and to grow - that comes from within the person themselves. As leaders it’s important to recognise that we can’t directly motivate anyone to do anything. The closest we can get is through demands and threats, which is unfortunately what all too many leaders default to. While that might lead to a short-term lift in performance driven by fear, ultimately the impact is negative on the individual and the organisation.

Instead what we’re aiming for is aligned motivation. If someone shows up at your workplace, they’re motivated. As a leader our role is to uncover what specifically motivates that individual, and to help align that with the direction and needs of the organisation. We do that by creating the right environment.

In summary - the person owns the motivation, and the leader owns the environment that helps to align that motivation.

So how do leaders shape the environment? We shape the environment through the leadership behaviours we demonstrate - the actions we take that build the kind of environment where people can thrive. The concept of leadership styles is not new - the styles I refer to are informed by over 80 years of research by people including Kurt Lewin, Fred Fiedler, Martin Evans, Robert House, James McGregor Burns, Bernard Bass, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. 

There are four sets of leadership behaviours or leadership styles that are particularly helpful in building a positive environment.

The first leadership style is Inspiring. This involves developing a compelling vision for the work that we undertake, communicating that vision, and aligning roles and individuals to the vision. This helps to increase clarity, and it also encourages alignment. People know where we are headed, they know their role, and they can connect their own motivations with that broader purpose. This is like sunlight for the lemon tree - providing energy and a direction to grow. My own research with over 1,000 leaders demonstrated that having a feeling you’re contributing to something meaningful reduced negative stress by 31%, and increased engagement by 74%. It even increased an individual’s likelihood of staying with the organisation by a full 87%.

The second leadership style is Developing. Here we’re discussing the skills and capabilities people want to develop, coaching people, providing stretch opportunities, and investing in their development. This ensures people are developing their capability, while we’re also building the capacity of the organisation. This is like watering the lemon tree - encouraging its development. Here my research saw more significant results. Where people felt they were developing in areas important to them, their stress was 26% lower, engagement was up by 60% and again the likelihood of staying was up by 87%.

The third leadership style is Connecting. This is where we help connect people with others that can provide support, while we also identify opportunities to work across the organisation, build teamwork, and provide direct support and encouragement. This style helps ensure people have the support they need, while also building collaboration for the organisation. This is like adding nutrients to give that extra boost to the lemon tree. Where people felt their job provided the chance to make meaningful connections, my research showed a 22% reduction in negative stress, with engagement up 57% and likelihood of staying up 68%.

The fourth style is Delegating. Here we delegate important work to people, even when it may mean a short term dip in performance. We focus more on accountabilities and outcomes, giving people greater freedom about how they produce results. This provides the individual with authority, while also enabling us to hold them accountable. It’s like giving the lemon tree extra room to grow - putting it in a larger pot, or planting it with plenty of space to spread out. Again my research showed that providing people with autonomy and freedom has a significant impact, with negative work-related stress down 20%, engagement up 52% and likelihood of staying up 55%.

There are two other styles that also influence the work environment, but not always in a positive way.

Directing is about telling people how to do their work, closely monitoring people, and emphasising the negative consequences of getting things wrong. There are some times when this leadership style is appropriate - it provides task clarity and control. But it does this at the cost of autonomy and personal responsibility. This one is a bit like yelling at the lemon tree - it might make you feel better, but the tree won’t take much notice.

The final leadership style is Avoiding. As the name suggests, this is where a person avoids the role of being leader altogether, keeping tasks to themselves, focusing on their own job, and avoiding delegating to people who have let them down. While the individual may be productive, team productivity is likely to be low. It looks a lot like the guy who left the lemon tree in his garage so he could focus on other things. Perhaps that worked well for him, but it didn’t turn out too well for the lemon tree.

The really good news is that, like any other behaviour, leadership styles can be developed. A great way to start is to assess your own leadership styles. I’ve developed a great card-sort exercise which I use on leadership programs that helps people to identify their preferred styles. And I also have a Leadership Styles Self-Assessment which I’m providing as a free gift for those who sign up for Leadership Today updates. Just head to the leadership.today website, and sign up on the Connect page and I’ll send you a link. If you’ve already signed up, have no fear - I’ll be emailing you a link shortly.

I’ll be interested in how you find the assessment, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next week.

Note: The concept of leadership styles is not new, and the styles in this podcast are informed by over 80 years of research by people including Kurt Lewin, Fred Fiedler, Martin Evans, Robert House, James McGregor Burns, Bernard Bass, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard.  This particular combination of leadership styles (Inspiring, Developing, Connecting, Delegating, Directing and Avoiding) and their impact on the work environment is unique, and copyright by Leadership Today.

Episode 27 - Psychological Safety - The Hard Edge to Feeling Safe at Work

Summary

How safe do you feel at work to speak up, raise an idea or a concern, or to try something new? This week we look at psychological safety, and how it has an unexpectedly hard edge.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 27 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re looking at psychological safety - the hard edge to feeling safe at work.

How safe do you feel at work to speak up, raise an idea or a concern, or to try something new?

There has been increasing interest over the past few years about the importance of psychological safety in the workplace, a concept originating in the 1990s. This has been driven, in no small part, by highly publicised research conducted by Google on what makes a team effective at Google - which they called project Aristotle.

Before we go too much further, it’s worth talking about some of the details and definitions of the study.

They defined a team as being a group of people who are highly interdependent - that team members need each other to produce results. They’re not just working alongside each other.

They studied a wide and diverse range of teams, from 3 to 50 individuals - with the median size being 9 team members.

They explored the effectiveness of teams, using a range of measures including evaluations by the executives, team leaders, team members and also sales performance. And they explored a range of variables gathered through interviews and survey data, alongside demographics such as tenure and location.

Now they’re quick to note that this is what matters for teams at Google - obviously these results may vary elsewhere. 

This research was interesting as much for what they found didn’t matter, at least when working at Google: things like colocation (working in the same place), team size, individual performance, and extroversion levels - none of those factors had a significant impact.

So what were the factors they found to be most significant for effective teams? They found five factors, and let’s work through those in reverse order of importance:

• Number five was having an impact - making a difference was really important

• Number four was a sense of meaning and purpose

• Number three was structure and clarity - where people understood their role and objectives

• Number two was dependability - where people reliably complete work on time

• And the number one factor, as you might expect, was psychological safety

One definition of psychological safety is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”.  Basically I feel confident people won’t “embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”

Importantly, psychological safety isn’t ’soft’ - it isn’t about avoiding disagreements or withholding corrective feedback - it’s not about bubble wrapping the environment so people can’t hurt themselves. Rather, an environment with psychological safety is supportive but stretching. Once people are free to try things and make mistakes, we are better able to set high standards and hold people to account. A workplace with psychological safety isn’t about comfort - in fact, it can feel quite uncomfortable as you’re being stretched into new areas (you might want to see our episode on conscious incompetence). However, you feel supported. You are still responsible for the consequences of your actions, but your fellow team members want you to succeed and have got your back. It’s better to think of psychological safety as something that makes people confident, not comfortable.

There are two major leadership styles, or sets of leadership behaviours that are most relevant to psychological safety:

• The first is Connecting - that, as leaders, we help to connect people with others that can support them - we work on the team and seek to build team effectiveness

• The second is Delegating - we provide the freedom for people to try things out, we give them autonomy, and we delegate important responsibilities to them

So that sounds great for the individual, but what’s in it for the organisation? Providing a connected and supportive workplace leads to increased collaboration. It’s an environment where people are much more willing to contribute, take chances, learn from each other, and contribute to each others’ success. And providing authority allows us to hold people to account.

Holding people accountable may initially sound negative, but of course it also involves proving positive feedback and celebrating successes. Google started a company called X, which now sits under Alphabet. They also called this the “Moonshot Factory”. Here their mission was to  “create radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems”. They had projects like using balloons to provide internet access in remote locations, drone delivery, self-driving vehicles, and kites to generate electricity. Importantly they don’t just celebrate successes, but also celebrate projects that are shut down - recognising the efforts put in, even if ultimately the project doesn’t prove to be feasible.

In summary, nice cultures aren’t always nice places to work, if that niceness means covering over disagreements. As leaders, let’s build environments where people can stretch themselves, try new things, make the occasional mistake, learn from that, and ultimately develop to produce even greater results.

Well I hope you found today’s podcast helpful and if you did it would be great if you could recommend it to a few of your friends. The podcast is really growing in terms of the number of people downloading it each week, and that makes a real difference in terms of the impact we can have in developing leaders.

Also, if some of the content in today’s podcast was of interest, I have a one day leadership foundations program which covers things like motivation, leadership styles, building resilience - a range of things that are really important across a number of leadership roles. If that’s of interest, just make contact via the website at leadership.today. And while I’m on the topic, if you go to the connect page there you can sign up for our regular updates and also to connect with us on LinkedIn and Facebook. See you next week.

References

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/How-Fearless-Organizations-Succeed

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?smid=pl-share

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2666999?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/introduction/

Episode 26 - Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Why We Get What We Expect

Summary

The self-fulfilling prophecy describes how our expectations of others can lead them to act in a way that confirms those expectations. As leaders it’s time to reset our expectations so we can get the best out of our people and stop holding them back.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 26 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re looking at self-fulfilling prophecies, and why we get what we expect.

It’s a sunny Wednesday in 1932 as the CEO of Last National Bank walks towards his desk. The bank is thriving and financially strong, and Cartright Millingville is rightly proud of the business he oversees. But as he continues past the tellers, he notices the queue of people lining up is much longer than usual - nothing to worry about at this point, but certainly different to most Wednesday mornings. As he takes a seat at this desk the noise and activity in the bank gradually grows, with people becoming increasingly unruly. And that’s because this is no ordinary day - hundreds of people are lining up to withdraw all of their funds from the bank, having heard a rumour of the bank’s imminent collapse. Despite the bank’s strong financial position, it could not survive the initially false, but ultimately true, perception that it might be at risk. The bank collapsed and closed its doors permanently the same day. The false perception became fact.

The sociologist Robert Merton shares this example in his classic 1948 paper - The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. In the paper he describes how our expectations can influence the world around us. Thinking that a financial institution is at risk of collapse can ultimately lead to its collapse. In the same way, our expectations of others can lead them to behave in line with these expectations. Merton defines the self-fulfilling prophecy as “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the originally false conception come true.” And, of course, this outcome strengthens the original perception of the situation, as Merton continues “for the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning”. 

A common example of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the placebo effect. In drug trials, prospective new medications are put up against placebo pills. These placebo pills have no direct physical impact on the individual. But believing that a placebo tablet will have an impact is often enough for it to actually have that impact. For that reason, finding drugs that work better than placebos can be difficult. It’s not that a placebo is neutral - the expectation the person has of the placebo tablet actually makes that outcome more likely. More recent research demonstrates that the placebo effect is so strong, it can still work even when the person knows that they’re taking a placebo. By way of example, Dr Ted Kaptchuk treated patients with irritable bowel syndrome by giving them a tablet openly identified to the patient as a placebo. This group demonstrated significant improvement in their symptoms compared to a group that didn’t receive a placebo. As Dr Kaptchuck notes, this clearly can’t work for all medical issues. However he sees the greatest potential for so called ‘open-label’ placebo treatments in conditions that are largely measured through self-observation - conditions including pain, nausea and fatigue. Placebo tablets and treatments are a great example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Classic experiments in schools have also shown the impact of the self-fulfilling prophecy. In the 1960s, Rosenthal and Jacobsen undertook a series of experiments with teachers and students. In one experiment, they chose a group of students at random and told teachers that those children had taken a test which showed they were “growth spurters” - that they had high potential and were likely to experience great progress in the year to come. The children weren’t aware of this finding - only the teachers knew. But the group was actually not special - they hadn’t taken a test and had no reason to advance more quickly than their peers. At the end of the year the evidence was in - the students identified as “growth spurters” to the teachers demonstrated significantly greater improvement across the year than their peers. Believing a student had greater potential led them to demonstrate greater potential. This research has been replicated many times and while some more recent research has questioned the size of the effect, the effect is still there.

So how does this work? It’s believed teachers’ expectations impact the way they treat their students and this, in turn, changes the behaviour of the students, helping them to reach those expectations. If I think a student has high potential, I’ll treat them differently, by giving them more opportunities to develop and demonstrate this potential. 

Research has found this same effect alive and well in our organisations too, where supervisor expectations can modify performance. Which raises another point - having low expectations can also lead people to reduced performance.

As a leader, findings like these should make us pause and think: What expectations do I have of my people? What evidence do I have for these expectations? Are my expectations limiting the performance and potential of my people?

What if we wiped the slate clean as leaders and expected more out of our people? What impact might that have?

What if we expect that people turn up to work wanting to do a good job. That people can and want to develop and improve. That if the conditions are right, people can deliver even more than what we expect of them.

While we’re at it, what expectations do we have of ourselves? Are there limiting beliefs you have about yourself that lead people to treat you differently? Perhaps you don’t expect to get a promotion, and this leads others to see you as less worthy of a promotion. Perhaps you joke about being lazy, which leads others to see you as lazy. You might take some time this week to consider your strengths. One way to do this is to take a survey like the VIA Character Strengths which can help identify your unique strengths. Embracing your strengths will help you to present more confidently to others, and change the way they view you in line with the expectations you place on yourself.

Let me know how you go, and have a great week.

References

The Self-Fulfilling ProphecyAuthor(s): Robert K. MertonSource: The Antioch Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), pp. 193-210

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-know-placebo-201607079926

Eden, D. (1984). Self-fulfilling prophecy as a management tool: Harnessing Pygmalion. The Academy of Management Review, 9(1), 64-73.

VIA Character Strengths Survey - available free - www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey