Leadership requires both self-awareness and selflessness. Effective leaders know how to balance the purpose of their organization with their own self-interests.
Today’s post is by Jan Rutherford – author of The Littlest Green Beret. You can learn more about Jan at the end of this post.
The thing about leadership development is that it all starts with everyone’s favorite subject – themselves. Self awareness is the starting point for effective leadership, and it’s always interesting to watch my students obsess about survey results, feedback from peers, aptitude tests, and what it all means to their careers. The focus shouldn’t be on oneself, but on the leader’s effect on others. That is, our primary leadership tool is how we effectively communicate.
The variables are simply how well do we listen and how well do we speak to align expectations and achieve results? Ultimately, we control two things: where we spend our time, and how we respond to our environment. What priorities will best produce the results we’re after, and what attitude will we choose to deal with everyday ups and downs? After all, a leader’s environment is largely made up with a bevy of complex and unending interpersonal relationships.
Nick Petrie once published a brilliant white paper on “Future Trends in Leadership Development” where he discussed the transfer of greater developmental ownership to the individual. As a strong proponent of self-reliant leadership, I believe Petrie expertly articulated the need for developmental ownership to be squarely on the shoulders of the individual. Leadership can be an illusion of control, but changing your perspective on everyday experiences can provide inspirational learning opportunities for personal growth and development.
What questions should you routinely ask yourself? On a daily basis, what steps should you take to find personal success in your life’s work? Do you know your life’s work? Some say it’s the place where your passion and others’ needs intersect. I believe a key determinant of success is whether you can rely on yourself for self-coaching. However, self-reliant leadership is dependent on achieving a balance between independence and the interdependence of working with others to accelerate your own personal growth and development.
Self-reliance and leadership may seem to be contradictory notions, but there are three mutually supporting concepts:
Emotions are the core of all human beings but not managing them properly might be what is keeping your team from achieving the most efficiency in their day.
Today’s post is by Jon Wortmann, thoughtLEADERS instructor.
How much time is strong emotion wasting in your office? You know the routine: someone says something in a meeting, someone else flies off the handle. The meeting is effectively over. Or someone gets pissed about an email and starts talking to everyone in the office about how awful the sender is. The time spent cleaning up the spin cycle is exhausting and a drain. Or perhaps the most wasteful: people get angry and simply stop contributing.
Strong emotion is inevitable in our digital, global world. So many of us are working harder, longer, and at all hours of the day. The stress level running through our veins is higher than it used to be from the first moments we wake. Complicating the demands are the interruptions. Multiple screens, communication channels, open offices, and the expectation to respond instantly are literally driving us mad. Studies of interruption by Gloria Mark of UC Irvine show that when people are interrupted, they work faster. Here’s the problem she also discovered: They get more stressed too. The stress causes us to get stuck in an emotionally reactive place, and most of us don’t know what to do next.
I wrote my most recent book, What Keeps Leaders Up At Night, on a barstool at my kitchen counter. The day I started chapter 3, a chapter about stress, my neighbor started construction on her house. When I say “construction,” I mean a complete demolition that started at 5 AM and continued well into the night. The contractors enjoyed screaming profanities as loud as they could, blasting music, and doing the loudest possible work either very early in the morning or really late at night. The screaming. The hammering. The noise!
After a week, I was living in a state of chronic agitation, “grrrr-ing” throughout the day, not sleeping well at night, anticipating being awoken by a jackhammer or drill that would feel like it was inside my brain. My concentration and thinking were so shot that I couldn’t think, let alone write. In hindsight, I probably should have gone elsewhere to work, but I couldn’t think clearly. I was stuck in a state of stress-induced stupidity and mired in rage. My state of existence became a stream of fragmented grunts and groans. I lacked the brainpower to change the situation, to think: “Go to a coffee shop or your office, Nicole.” The deadline for chapter 3 was fast approaching.
Prolonged, chronic stress often causes relative stupidity. Today’s business environment is saturated with “low-grade fevers:” financial problems, overwork, job dissatisfaction, jackhammers, drills, information overload and a host of other issues. Amazingly enough, though our brains are capable of dealing with sudden acute stress, they don’t fare so well with chronic stress, i.e., the endless little yipping Chihuahuas that prompt what psychologists call the long-term fight/flight response.
Our stress response triggers hormone secretion (especially mood-altering cortisol) and the perceptions of a given threat determine the type and amount of hormones the endocrine system will dispense. A steady bombardment of blinking lights, phone beeps, email alerts, and personal/professional obligations build up a chemical cocktail that keeps our bodies in a constant state of edginess, impairing memory, thinking and learning. Left unnoticed or ignored, this condition increases the odds that you will end up with serious mental and/or physical health problems, or in my case, pure stupidity.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220404-Stressed-Woman-at-Laptop.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-04-04 08:00:592022-04-04 00:45:38The Role Stress Plays in Stupidity
Train your Inner Matrix to improve personal mastery in leadership, increase your potential for money and happiness, and enhance personal growth and development.
Whether you are seeking personal mastery in leadership, hoping to sharpen your skills in conflict resolution, or looking to take your career to the next level, understanding the relationship between your emotions and the actions you take is key.
Nick didn’t expect to be fired from his job, but when his boss broke the news, Nick did not react in the way you might expect. He didn’t wallow in self-pity or unworthiness. He didn’t decide he was a failure or a loser. He didn’t ask the seemingly obvious questions like, “What am I going to do now? How will I provide for my family? How can I possibly go on?” On the contrary, Nick walked out of his boss’s office feeling like a new man—excited and exhilarated by the prospect of new opportunities. What was Nick’s secret?
In the months leading up to the day he was let go from his job, Nick had been training his emotional state to align with his desired outcomes. In other words, Nick had been honing his Inner Matrix.
What is the Inner Matrix? Simply put, your Inner Matrix is your unique set of emotion and thought patterns that drive your actions. We all react to the people and events in our lives from an emotional state. The emotional states in which we are living create stories that drive the actions we take in response to those people and events. For example, when Beth was a little girl, her mother gave her cookies when she was feeling sad or scared. Now, as an adult, Beth associates cookies with comfort and safety. When she is feeling sad or scared, Beth reaches for the Oreos. Her emotional state drives her actions. And we can take it a step further. Beth believes she is overweight and out of shape. She’s been trying to cut back on sugar, so the action of reaching for the cookies triggers the emotion of shame which tells the story, “I can’t stop myself from eating the cookies; therefore, I’m a weak person; therefore, I’m a bad person.” Those thoughts fuel the emotions of sadness, or even fear, which in turn drive the desire to eat more cookies. Beth is caught in an emotion loop. The good news is, with training and practice, Beth’s Inner Matrix can be reconfigured and she can activate a new, more positive emotion loop.
Let’s go back to our friend, Nick (a real person, but not his real name). Nick had been considering a career change but he wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. He knew he wanted to make more money, work with people he enjoyed being around, and to be part of an expansive culture. All things that his current job did not offer. Rather than hammering out a thousand applications to a thousand different companies, hoping to land on something that matched his criteria, Nick decided to create the conditions within himself that would attract the outcome he was looking for. He started by defining the emotional state from which he would operate. For Nick, that emotion was inspiration. He thought about all of the positive results he wanted to cultivate for himself. He wrote them down, he imagined them, and he trained the emotion of inspiration as it pertained to his job. Day after day, he started coming into work feeling more inspired, more energetic, and more passionate. These new emotions were not part of the culture in which he was currently working. And so, the fateful day came when he was called into the boss’s office. Nick was presented with a fact: You are no longer employed. But because of his training, Nick was able to avoid telling himself the story that he was a failure. Instead he told himself the story of an opportunity to make his life better, that losing this job was a sign that better things are coming. His emotional state was aligned with the outcomes he was choosing to create. He had attuned his Inner Matrix to achieve the results he desired.
Whether you are looking to advance your career or improve performance in your current job, you too can train yourself to create any outcome in three simple steps: 1. Recognize the patterns in your Inner Matrix that are creating less than optimal results. 2. Stop those patterns. 3. Train new patterns that align with your desired results.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/20220321-Worker-by-Window.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-03-21 08:00:472022-03-22 17:18:48Training Your Inner Matrix for Career Success
Good leaders ask, “How do I tell better stories?” Great leaders ask, “What stories do I need to tell?”
Does that mean how you tell a leadership story doesn’t matter? Of course not. But if you tell an irrelevant or unimportant or self-serving story, it doesn’t matter how well you tell it. The story is more important than the delivery.
And while great leaders need hundreds of stories, not all stories are equally important. I’ve interviewed over 300 CEOs, leaders, and executives in 25 countries around the world about their use of storytelling in business. Here’s my conclusion about the most important ten stories any leader needs to be able to tell at a moment’s notice:
ONE: Where we came from (our founding story) – Nobody ever quit their job and started a company for a boring reason. Find that reason for your company’s founder and tell that story. It will infect everyone with the same sense of purpose and passion.
TWO: Why we can’t stay here (a case-for-change story) – Human beings are creatures of habit. Change is an unwelcome visitor. This story provides the rationale for why change is needed and a real human reason to care. Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/20220314-Book.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-03-14 08:00:322022-03-14 04:07:28The Ten Stories Great Leaders Tell
Everyone has horror stories about a micro-managing boss. Here are a few strategies to manage your micro-manager.
Today’s post is by Victor Prince, a principal here at thoughtLEADERS.
If you work long enough, you will have a micro-managing boss. They think they know your job better than you do. Maybe they had your job before they got promoted to management. They focus on how you do your job instead of on the results you produce. They think that because you are doing your job differently than they would, you must be doing it incorrectly. Micro-management is a big driver of dissatisfaction and attrition in the workplace.
Here are 7 strategies to manage a micromanaging manager.
Diagnose the Situation – Is your boss micro-managing others or just you? It is important to understand whether you are being singled out or if you are just one of many victims. If they micro-manage others too, it’s probably them, not you. But if you are the only one being micro-managed, it might be you and it is worth figuring out why. Perhaps your boss is just more interested in your job than others. Or perhaps, they think you need closer scrutiny. If your boss’s micro-management is due to problems with your performance, you need to surface that discussion with them and address that head on.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/20220306-Point-at-Laptop.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-03-07 08:00:062022-03-06 22:52:10Seven Strategies to Manage a Micro-Manager
Getting promoted comes with an increase in power. Use that newfound power wisely. If you do, your leadership position will improve. If you don’t, it could spell disaster for you.
Congratulations! You just got the big promotion to management. People now report to you, you have some budget, and you have some decision-making authority. In short, your new role comes with power.
Just like electricity, power is a very useful asset but can be dangerous if misused. Here are 7 tips for how to use your power so you don’t abuse or lose it.
1. Don’t Use it for Personal Gain – Some potential pitfalls are easy to spot but many are more gray than black or white. What starts as “relationship-building” with vendors can slide into contract-steering after a few too many fancy dinners. What starts as “team-building” in the office can slide into inappropriate requests outside the office. Now that you have power at work, you have to keep a firewall between your work and personal needs so you aren’t seen as using your work power for personal gain.
2. Don’t Play Favorites – Now that you have power, people will ask you to use it to help them. They want a decision to go their way. They want more staff or a bigger piece of the budget. Whatever it is, you know and like some people more than others so you may unintentionally factor that into decisions. Favoritism is a slippery slope to trouble. People not getting favored treatment will notice and criticize you for it. People benefitting from your kindness may come to expect it. Stick to the facts and merits. Whenever making a decision, think about how you would explain your decision if someone accused you of favoritism.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/20220221-Lightning.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-02-21 08:00:182022-02-21 01:39:547 Tips for How to Use, Not Lose, Your Power at Work
Are you protecting your most important asset? No, it’s not your buildings, your equipment, or your investment accounts. It’s your people. Especially those rising stars whose contributions affect your bottom line and your future success.
The true cost of losing an employee goes largely unrecognized in many companies. Are you paying attention to this cost? Some managers shrug off this expense as a normal cost of doing business. Because there is no mechanism in place to compute the actual cost, the reality of the loss does not get reported to top management or discussed in terms of its strategic impact. But you can change all that.
Here’s the caveat: you need to be proactive. Don’t wait until turnover costs spiral out of control before you develop and implement a retention program. Start by mentally separating your employees into three categories:
– top performers – mid-level performers – lowest performers
While you may ultimately need to replace those in the third category, let’s concentrate on the other two. There are three important ingredients in an effective employee retention strategy: Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/20220110-Number-3.jpg?fit=1920%2C1285&ssl=112851920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-01-10 08:00:322022-01-10 01:44:443 Steps for Protecting Your Most Important Asset
Our teams are under tremendous pressure. That pressure creates stress which diminishes performance. You can build a more resilient team through some simple leadership behaviors.
Let’s imagine that you are in a unique position. Your team has the talent it needs. Your organization has a strategy that continues to work with a plan that will adapt to your competitor’s actions. You have enough cash to handle the changes in your markets. Your team is ready to work hard and the energy in your offices has never been better. There’s only one question left to answer: is your team built to last?
The problem with our global economy, political uncertainty, and reactive media is that too many of us are living at our edges. We work hard. Our kids’ schedules make us look like our schedules are calm. We play a lot. We travel constantly. We are on our phones frenetically. This means that our brains are always paying attention to something—until they can’t.
In the hot seats of Humvees looking for IEDs or the turrets of tanks, our service men and women rotate out every half hour to 90 minutes. Most of us can only concentrate for 40 minutes at a time, but we expect our teams to start early with staff meetings, handle conference calls on international schedules, and respond to emails at all hours. Our brains are not built for the constant stimulation.
So how do we stay focused and mentally healthy when our expectations of ourselves and our teams to produce keep us under constant pressure?
Give people freedom
Your ideal schedule may not match the people on your team. In a study where students were given control over their time, they reported higher happiness, more role clarity, and less overload. How much would happy teammates who knew their job and felt like they could handle it be worth to your organization?
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/20220103-Team-Laughing.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-01-03 08:00:562022-01-03 01:41:49Is Your Team Built to Last?
Leadership is a skill that requires constant practice. The world changes and brings new challenges every day. How can you ensure you’re staying fresh as a leader and not going the way of the dinosaur?
Leadership abilities can grow stale and out of date. While most leaders have good intentions, and want to do a great job, the early excitement for the position can quickly turn into frustration from the demands.
Leadership isn’t for the faint of heart, and it isn’t ‘learned’ once you’ve attended a leadership conference. It is a challenging skill that must evolve with your personal growth and a changing workforce.
Make a choice to be the leader who is continually growing and maturing in leadership abilities and new skills for leading the team. This podcast will provide insight on whether you might be going the way of the leadership dinosaur and how you can turn that around.
Here at thoughtLEADERS, I’m fortunate to work with some incredibly bright people. Maureen Metcalf is one of them. She recently discussed the topic of staying fresh as a leader with Steve Caldwell at Manager Mojo. They got together on his podcast to discuss how to keep yourself from going the way of the dinosaur. Listen to the podcast here:
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211220-Dinosaur.jpg?fit=1920%2C1281&ssl=112811920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2021-12-20 08:00:502021-12-20 00:39:33Are You Becoming a Leadership Dinosaur?
Conflict is an ever-present part of life. The more comfortable you are with dealing with it, the more effectively you can resolve it. Conflict resolution requires you to know the three R’s – recognize conflict, respond to conflict, and resolve the conflict.
The meeting had been going so well until Josh brought up the org chart—again. The firm had made some changes recently and he didn’t like the new structure. The room went still. Kate, the most senior leader in the room, spoke up. “Josh, let’s finish our planning and we can talk about structure later.”
“I am talking about planning,” Josh said. “How can we plan the roll-out if we don’t know how our new structure will execute it?” Josh was a pro at reframing any issue to bring up his agenda. If he weren’t such a talented designer, he would not have lasted this long.
What should Kate say next?
Conflict is like the weather. No matter how many good days you have in a row, eventually it will rain. And as rain is essential to the earth, conflict is actually crucial for every team and organization. The conflict Josh is creating may feel pointless, even manipulative. Well handled, it can be the kind of moment every leader and manager welcomes. It is better to see frustration and resolve it than have it buried. Teammates that hide their true impressions don’t engage real problem solving. Open conflict resolved consistently builds trust.
What Kate says next will either be a reaction based on the stress conflict causes, or it can be an intentional, practiced approach. The fear of conflict doesn’t come from our apprehension about differing opinions or disagreements. Most of us like the learning that comes from new ideas and being intellectually challenged. Our anxiety comes out when we don’t know how to manage and resolve the heated conversations and meetings that stop us from working well with the people on our teams.
In every conflict scenario, the first skill is to recognize it. When people experience conflict, we get triggered. As lions roar, rabbits run, deer freeze, and geese flock under stress, we’ve discovered that people revert to four reactions in conflict. We become passive-aggressive, confrontational, avoidant, or compliant.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211213-Letter-R.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2021-12-14 08:00:142021-12-13 23:16:57The Three R’s of Conflict Resolution
The caller ID stated “Mike.” The phone was on the fourth ring. I held it in front of me, watching the screen, mouth dry, sitting at my desk, thinking, “Here it goes again. He’s going to speak Chinese and I won’t understand.”
Creative Food, the vegetable-processing company I had started in China the year before, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Every project I initiated had failed. All the foreign experts I had hired had left. My operations were in such bad shape that my own customers, who included big fast-food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut asked my new recruits why they had come aboard a ship that was sure to sink. On that day, once I finally answered the phone, I had to ask Mike to repeat himself several times. Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20211114-Four.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2021-11-15 08:00:062021-11-14 23:26:33Four Ways to Become a Complete Leader
