so it’s time to move again.
With my partner (in life and business), Lori Shook, we have created something to be truly excited about:
It is time to say bye, bye to all of my blog followers at Galapagos Coaching and wish you a warm welcome at ShookSvensen
See you there!
Frode
Sometimes I bring “stuff” from my work back to my personal life and relationships, and often I bring “stuff” from my personal life to my work. One example is how we do appreciations. Before my wife and I go to sleep we make sure we share a couple of “I love you because…” It is a nice, little tradition to show what we appreciate about each others and I certainly like to hear her tell me out loud that she appreciated <whatever it is she have noticed that day>.
How do we do this in the workplace? Where statements starting with “I love you because…” would probably be reported to HR? :-)
In numerous courses that I have led I have found an opportunity to create a small (or large) circle and have each person look at the person across the circle and just say “What I appreciate about you, (name), is …”. No feedback, no criticism, no explanations. Just appreciation. It creates a wonderful boost of positivity.
What if we did more of this? What if you started doing it every Friday afternoon in your team? What would you create? What do you have to loose?
The heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson isn’t usually reckoned as a great philosopher, but I love this quote: ”Everybody has a plan – until they are punched in the mouth”.
I have so often seen people have these great plans on how to do their project, their business, how to deal with their people etc etc. And then reality kicks in and they continue according to their plan even if it will not take them towards the goal.
So: “plan for success and prepare for disaster”. Don’t forget that it is the skills and the abilities of your people that will ultimately get you to the goal. The plan is temporary, and just a way of getting to the goal. Keep the goal in sight and be prepared to change everything in order to get there.
A great example from Bill’s tips on meeting management: NEVER let the agenda of the meeting be more important than answering the question: “what is the goal of this meeting?” Then the agenda becomes just one of many possible ways of getting there.
I have been reading a lot lately and I just finished:
”Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-ebook/dp/B002RI9BH6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306503313&sr=1-1
I liked it! I’ll give you a couple of practical consequences for us as leaders, let me just briefly explain what I got from the book.
Taleb writes about how our brain is so ill-equipped to handle probabilities. He gives some research reasons that really makes sense, like: when we were hard-wired as human beings (on the African savannah, and even in our recent past as hunter/gatherers) and even living in very simple societies, we needed to be good at making quick choices. Based on “hunches” or “gut feelings” or “emotions”. It’s quick and mostly effective and correct. In a simple society. Now, we are living in a VERY much more complicated society and we still make our decisions based on these emotions. And they are much more often wrong.
We are really very bad at dealing with probabilities. We can’t even imagine “a 50% chance of sun or a 50% chance of rain tomorrow”. Our brain wants to make a decision: Will there be rain or not? It struggles with the probability.
And then logic: Our emotional brain usually gets it wrong, and that is what we base our decisions on. As we read in MANY “get rich fast”-books: “Since all rich people are risk-takers, I postulate if you take more risk you will be rich”.
Problem is: A LOT of risk-takers are not rich. Duh.
Only when we formulate in the following, over-simplified way, most can see it that it is false:
“All the members of the Smith family have red hair – I have red hair, so I must be a Smith”.
Here is an example from my history:
“We hire the best students from university with the best grades”.
“Why?”
“We believe that they will have more success in our company.”
In all the organizations I have worked in or for, we never went back and checked. Did the ones with higher grades have more success than those with lower grades?
Some of you do go back and check – what is the sample you are using? How much of this is statistically significant anyway? How much is chance or luck?
And – here is the Taleb’s point: What about the ones we didn’t hire (mostly ALL the students since we just hire a very small portion). What was the result over 5 years of all the students? Are the ones we hired more successful?
There is no way to know.
And still we insist on hiring the students with the best grades.
The false logic isn’t as easy to spot now:
“All those with success here have good grades – I have good grades, so I must make success”.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I did.
The medieval “jester” is currently misunderstood by many. Nowadays he (usually a he) is seen as a funny figure with a funny hat who made jokes and made people laugh. Yup, that was also his role, but a more important role of the jester was: he could tell the King the truth that no-one else dared deliver.
I believe a lot of “kings” today should hire a corporate jester.
Whenever I was “the boss” it made my life easier if the people working for me had “representatives”. And I truly believe it made their life easier, too.
During good times and bad times there are times when the information flow is difficult. Sometimes there are tough decisions to be made (or communicated) and sometimes you (as the boss) needs to hear something that it’s hard for a single person to tell you.
I have found it very useful to utilize the representative
Some of you work in industries or organizations where this is business as usual – you have union reps or similar. If you don’t, encourage your people to elect a representative. That person can deliver messages for the group and cannot be “punished” for speaking up.
I truly believe in Deep Democracy and processes where all voices are to be heard – but unfortunately, sometimes the hierarchy is such that some people will not speak their minds in front of the boss. They may give the message through the representative.
If you are in a position where you want to hire a corporate jester – give me a call :)
Everybody” seems to want more innovation and we (working in corporations) don’t seem to get enough of it.
I’ll keep writing about incentives in other entries, but to start with: There seems to be a paradox here. You – as a leader – want to incentivise people for being creative, and being creative means doing “new” stuff, out-of-the-box-stuff etc. How do we motivate and reward people for doing NOT the stuff we are used to? Well, it is actually possible to reward this kind of behaviour. More on this later.
Here’s a couple of tips how YOU can be more innovative:
1. TAKE NOTES.
An idea doesn’t stay in your head for a long time – maybe not more than 20 seconds. So capture it. Write it down. Nowadays you can use your phone, iPad, etc – creative people caryy a notebook.
2. TAKE ON CHALLENGES.
Force yourself to do things in a new way. Create obstacles and take on new projects. We are very creative when we have to do things we don’t like – because we want to find ways to avoid it :-)
3. TAKE ON NEW KNOWLEDGE
Steve Jobs has become famous for his speech to the Stanford students where he praises the stuff he learned when he didn’t know how he was ever going to use it. (His calligraphy course from his past gave the Apple it’s variable fonts).
The more you know the more you can make “new” combination and create new “stuff”. And the more you know the more you don’t have to guess.
4. TAKE ON NEW ENVIRONMENT
If your environment is the same all the time, your body doesn’t have to create new behaviour. Redecorate, move, change the way you get to work. Etc Etc. Habits are not creative.
“Stay hungry – stay foolish”
Soria Moria is the golden castle – way up in the mountains. It’s where your dreams live. It’s far away and you may only get a glimpse of it – and you know it’s there.
You are on your way,BUT
There are Trolls in the way. Trolls are as old as the landscape they live in. They live in the mountain – inside the mountain. They know all about the landscape they live in. They are there to stop you from getting to your Soria Moria.
There are BIG TROLLS and small trolls. The trolls are one-eyed – they are stubborn.
They use all they can and all they know – not to create possibilities, but to limit your choices, to STOP you and they hate CHANGE.
How to tame the trolls?
They cannot stand the sunlight. When they are hit by sunlight they turn into a rock and they loose power. They hate that we laugh at them. So get them out into the sun!
I think we all have trolls inside. They are stubborn and one-eyed and they stop us from going for our dreams. They hate change, they know our fears and all our weaknesses.
What can a coach do?
We can together identify your dreams and find your Soria Moria. We can identify your trolls and bring them into the sun where they loose power.
So that you can tame your trolls and reach your Soria Moria.
See also Rick Carson’s “Taming Your Gremlin”
There is a video of my dad, me and my (then) 6-year old son walking away – side by side – down the street. It is amazing to see how I have completely copied my fathers little limp (from his injury) and the way he holds his arms on his back – and so have my son.
I guess I copied my father because I thought this was the way a grown man was supposed to walk – and that stuck. My son was just repeating the process.
NOW I know that there are a lot of different ways to walk and how to use (or not) your arms when walking. So I can vary when I want to – when I am conscious.
Who are you copying in your leadership role? How conscious are you about this process? Are you adding the little limps and anomalies that you saw in your first boss? Even the ones that doesn’t make sense in your circumstances?
This question is possibly even scarier:
“What are the ways that your people will copy from you and bring on to their leadership style?”
I know they will copy you. You can choose to get more conscious about what you want them to copy.
So, welcome to leadership! If you are a first-time leader or an experienced one, I guess you often have the challenge of balancing between being “the buddy” in the team or “the boss”.
How do we balance this?
“Be yourself”. Yeah, right, Frode. That is SO not helpful. When someone tells me to be myself, I go: “what???”. Who knows who I am.
What I think is helpful is for me to spend reflection time and figuring out what I want to do. What actions to take. It is great to have role models, but I cannot BE like them. I have to do this in a Frode way. And I will do mistakes that I can learn from if I let myself reflect. I try to Act-React-Reflect.
This is why I strongly urge you to have reflection time. Yes, you do have the time, if you take the time. 15-20 minutes each day without phones or any other disturbances (also not driving or biking).
Some of my clients ask me: “What am I supposed to do when I reflect. Don’t I do enough planning and reviewing already?” I ask them to look in their backpack. And train yourself to find interesting questions to ask yourself about what kind of leader you want to be.
A lot of you face the same challenge:
You are (often) promoted from the team you used to work with – and then you have to grapple with the new role as a leader of a group of people you used to be part of.
So what do you do?
Some of you become “too soft”. (If you get “too tough”, see here.) You are so concerned about being seen as “the boss” that you overcompensate. You are avoiding the conflicts, you accept mediocre results, you even accept flippant comments that undermine you authority. You don’t dare to assess people and you avoid giving them the much needed feedback. You more than before hang out with the team after hours, you Facebook-friend them and you neither lead nor manage your team. Whatever authority you had that made someone promote you are rapidly disappearing. You are afraid of becoming un-popular. Your team gets away with disrespect.
Sounds familiar?
It sounds like you are trying to be who you were before and play an impossible role:
“The circumstances and roles changed, but heck if I’m gonna change my behaviour”.
Sorry, but this doesn’t work. It is not authentic leadership.
You took on the leader role for a reason, right? You actually do have a role to play in the team that is different from the other roles. A role of guidance, mentoring, coaching, managing, mitigation etc etc – all the things that great leaders do. And it includes giving straight feedback and sometimes to assess the performance of team members. To become unpopular at times.
It can work if you listen to your values and reflect. It helps to get mentoring and training and coaching and reading and talking to your team about the new role.
Remember: It is POSSIBLE for you to be a leader. And it will work if you lead.
