Friday, February 27, 2015

Harnessing Passion

I was finishing a coaching engagement with a very accomplished woman this week and we were reflecting on all of her challenges and successes. We were talking about emotional control, particularly in management conversations.  

As we were talking, it occurred to me how often I find myself having this same conversation.  I hear from people who have a hard time not losing their cool and those who feel demoralized when they are on the receiving end.  Passion is powerful driver of engagement and results but when we are so emotionally involved in our work we run the risk of emotional volatility. When it comes to management competence, Emotional Control is a critical success factor.  Unfortunately, it’s also a tough one to master.  I am not the only one who thinks so.

In a recent article by Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, cited a survey conducted by Positive Psychologist Martin Seligman. He writes “ Self-control is so fleeting for most that when Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 2 million people and asked them to rank their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up at the very bottom.”

Dr. Casey Mulqueen, a psychologist and the Director of Research and Product Development at leadership training company Tracom Group, says: “executives can leverage psychology to be better leaders and get more out of their employees.” The concept is based on Emotional Intelligence (EQ), the ability to recognize, understand, and control your own and others' emotions.

Here’s a simplified explanation of what happens when you lose emotional control: “The human brain automatically reacts to physical or psychological threats by releasing hormones. It's a fight-or-flight response that's a remnant of our evolution from primates”, Mulqueen says, “When the hormones are released, it's hard to control your actions". But Mulqueen says that you can "effectively fight your own evolution" and "rewire your brain" to act appropriately by "recognizing your automatic responses, labeling them, and figuring what you have control over in the situation."

Engage your prefrontal cortex.

Mulqueen says that the amygdala, the part of your brain that releases stress hormones, activates whenever our grey matter registers a physical or psychological threat. This can happen if a colleague puts down your idea during a company meeting, if someone yells at you, or if you're doing a presentation and are afraid of public speaking. To battle this automatic response you need to engage your prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for logical reasoning and problem solving, while you're in the situation and before you respond.

Here are some suggestions I offer of ways to do just that:                                                      

Take a deep breath.  Deep breathing can slow your pulse and focusing on the process of breathing will distract you from the mental hijacking that the stress hormones are causing.

Write something down.  The process of writing is a reasoning process.  Whether you are taking notes or capturing the conversation on a flip chart, your thinking will shift to a more rational process once you start writing.

Ask a question.  The mental process of formulating a question will help you to focus on what the other person is trying to say even if the way they are saying it is less than constructive.
If you can’t rein it in, ask for a break.  Take a walk or schedule the conversation for a time when "cooler heads can prevail” and it’s likely to go better.  You might both benefit.

If you are in an email conversation, Begin your email by acknowledging what the other person has said, paraphrase their concerns. This doesn’t mean you agree, it simply means you are listening. Reread your responses three times and neutralize argumentative phrases or words before you send, or better yet have someone else take a look.

It’s really about harnessing your emotions and passions so that they enrich your life and serve your purpose.  Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence guru once said:   

"When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions"~ Daniel Goleman

imagecredit: mobilite.com


Friday, February 20, 2015

At the Expense of Good...

I was recently watching an episode of Shark Tank. Shark Tank is a television show where billionaire entrepreneurs (“sharks”) allow inventors and small business owners pitch their products.  The successful entrepreneurs grill the show’s contestants and if they are interested enough they offer financial backing in return for a stake in their ventures. On a recent episode, I heard Mark Cuban, (self-made billionaire and owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks) say something that struck me as particularly profound. A married couple was presenting their product to the sharks. It was clear that after years of pursuit, their very innovative product had never gotten off the ground.  As the sharks grilled the entrepreneurs, as they usually do, the couple lamented all the various limitations associated with every possible distribution option they had explored. Finally, losing his patience, Mark Cuban said “It seems to me you are chasing perfection at the expense of good.”  I liked the way he put that. It spoke to my current personal agenda. 

As I get older, I have become keenly focused on spending my time wisely and deliberately on things that matter most.  This “return on investment” mindset keeps me thinking about priorities, urgency and a commitment to focusing my effort on my personal strengths and my longer-term goals.

Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence guru describes this focus in a recent Harvard Business Review Article titled the Focused Leader.  He refers to this focused mode of thinking as “cognitive control”. “Cognitive control” is the scientific term for putting one’s attention where one wants it and keeping it there in the face of the temptation to wander. This focus is one aspect of the brain’s executive function, which is located in the prefrontal cortex. A colloquial term for it is “willpower.”

When it comes to business leaders, according to Goleman, cognitive control enables executives to pursue a goal despite distractions and setbacks. The same neural circuitry that allows such a single-minded pursuit of goals also manages unruly emotions. Good cognitive control can be seen in people who stay calm in a crisis, tame their own agitation, and recover from a debacle or defeat.

Here are some questions you can use to keep your focus where it needs to be…


What is the payoff for this time I am spending?

When details slow me down... How important is this particular detail to my end result?  If I move forward and settle for this current level of “perfection” what are the risks or consequences?

When my curiosity pulls me down a rabbit hole…Is there something else I should be doing right now?

When I choose easy feel good tasks for motivation... Should I be doing this right now? Is there another time that might be better for this? Can I limit the amount of time I am devoting to this task?.

Is there someone else who could or should be doing this, with me or for me? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it.

Who benefits from this time I am spending?  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be generous. I am usually blessed to have enough flexibility in my schedule that I can afford to be generous with my time. I like to decide when and how much I can give and it’s a really great reward when time spent wisely frees me up to support the needs of others.

This is really about efficiency, productivity, and achievement.  Meaningful achievement! After all, we are all granted the same 24 hours in a day.  No matter how industrious, creative or sleep-deprived we choose to be, we still only get 24! How we fill those hours is completely up to us.

I used to like to say that my favorite word was “Perfect”.  Recently, I am favoring the word "Progress"!

imagecredit: todaymade.com

Friday, February 13, 2015

10 Commandments of Giving Feedback


As you move through this month of February, and if you are a manager, you will likely be asked to provide some feedback to your direct reports.  Even if your organization doesn’t require an annual performance appraisal it’s a great idea to touch base.  Setting direction, providing feedback and sharing your expectations is important if you want your employees to stay on course. So here are the ten commandments of giving feedback.  Psst.... These work in your personal life too!

1.  Honor Contributions.
Before you even begin the feedback, value the individual. Discuss their role on the team.  Be sincere and thorough, discuss how the team member contributes.  Take your time, this will set the tone for the rest of the conversation.

2.  Give Positive Recognition and Make It Count.
Think about the strengths this person brings to the table. Be specific by giving examples that are illustrative of their strengths and encourage repeat shining performances.  Allow the positive feedback to stand alone, don't always use it as a "lead in" to more difficult topics.

3.  Be Specific.
Give examples.  Make sure your examples are recent and specific. Find a time to discuss the examples in private and allow enough time to have a good quality conversation.

4.  Describe Behavior.
Stay factual and neutral in your description.  Don’t describe why you think they are doing this or not doing that. Leave the intention to them, stay on your side of the conversation equation. Just stay with describing the observable behavior. Stay away from adjectives. Any words evoke a response and our reaction to adjectives can be very individual.  For example, words like "careless" or "not-engaged", may seem fairly innocuous to you but could be seem overly critical to another. It is safer to describe only what you can observe in specific terms.

5.  Careful with “Never”/”Always”.
Avoid words that are too extreme like “never” and “always”.  Whenever I hear these I want to challenge, Really? Always? What about the last time? Or the time before? Don’t let the conversation be sidetracked by this moot point. If the problem behavior happened it is a problem. If it is repeated share several recent examples.

6.  Ask and Listen.
Ask for their experience of the behavior to get an accurate picture of their motivations. "What happened there?" This is important to reduce defensiveness, but also to gain an accurate picture of how they might improve. Is it: Training? Poor decision-making? Time management? Organization?  Stay with their side of the story until you have a clear picture. Your communication here should be patient and open-minded. Understanding their thought process doesn’t mean you are endorsing it, just seeking clarity.

7.  Discuss "Natural" Consequences.
Discuss why the suggested change matters, what are the consequences if they don’t improve. I don’t mean disciplinary consequences although you might end up there. Why do you care?  For example, if someone misses meetings the consequence might be that they will not have access to information shared in that meeting, decisions taken there will not include their perspective may not serve their needs or those whose voice they are representing. They may even suffer a reputation hit if others see them as unreliable or disrespectful.  All of these consequences occur whenever the meeting is missed.  These are “natural” consequences, not disciplinary consequences. This makes it less personal.  You are not punishing, only holding up the mirror for them.

8.  Keep Emotional Control.
Thou shalt not lose emotional control. This seems like an obvious one but if you are angry you’d better wait a bit.  We want the emotion to match the urgency and importance of the issue, so this isn't about “sugar- coating”.  But you always want to be in control of your emotional expression in order to avoid personal attacks.

9.  Participate.
Offer support and ask for suggestions on how you might support their improvement.  You will want to be clear about how you can and cannot help.  This clarity will support your efforts to follow-up.  Now is the time to discuss the responsibility of change and what they can expect from you.  If the situation continues or gets worse you don’t want to hear later about all the things you could have or should have done to help.

10.  Be Optimistic.
Create a vision of new and improved outcomes, express your optimism about getting there and schedule some specific time to follow-up. Change is not easy and will require a level of deliberate effort.  You will want your communication to be selling and encouraging here.


Sounds easy, but of course it isn’t.   Frequency on this will increase trust so try not to let issues build-up.  February the perfect time to get things moving in the right direction for 2015!  

Friday, February 6, 2015

Practice

We were all brought up to believe that practice would make us perfect. It’s what carried us through those piano lessons on sunny afternoons; it’s the sage advice that helped us get over the lost game on the baseball diamond or soccer field. But the true benefits of “practice” may be greater than you ever imagined.

Mastery and Practice

The idea that 10,000 hours (about 1 year and 51 day’s total) of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields was initially popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Outliers.

There has been much debate around Gladwell’s theory of 10,000 hours which was loosely based on the work of professor of psychology, K. Anders Ericsson. In Ericsson’s 1993 article The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, he and his co-authors first presented the idea of a required amount of preparation time or the 10-year, 10,000-hours, rule, as a magic number in acquiring a level of mastery. But more of their work focuses on how world-class individuals are spending their 10,000 hours. Specifically, it isn’t just about 10,000 hours of doing the activity; it’s 10,000 hours of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” According to the paper, “deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.”

Focused Mental Practice

Ericcson speaks directly about the nature of deliberate practice another of his articles, The Making of an
Expert.

“To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades.

However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills.

Practice and Strengths

Although deliberate effort will certainly allow us to improve any capability, when the deliberate effort is applied specifically to our natural abilities the rewards are even more significant. In Tom Rath’s best seller Strengthsfinder 2.0, he describes the science of building strengths. Based on the work of Donald O. Clifton, Rath provides and formula for optimizing strengths. “Building raw talents into strengths requires practice and hard work, much like it does to build physical strengths.”

In the growing field of Positive Psychology, this “identify and use” approach to strengths psychology has continued to grow in clinical circles as scientific research supports the exponential payoffs in personal motivation, engagement and overall satisfaction. Translating raw talents into strengths takes deliberate and focused repetition.

Making Your Practice More Deliberate

  • Make time for practicing new skills every day
  • Plan how you will approach your practice
  • Add experimentation to your practice in order to improve your range of skill
  • Set milestones and longer-term goals 
  • Reflect and measure your progress

So, whether you are attempting to extend you range of skills or advancing a natural ability, the answer is the same. Be focused and deliberate in your practice! Remember, as Vince Lombardi once said, “Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”
image credit: alaninteraction.com