Mood Contagion - Are You Infecting Your Team?

John did very well in his job.  As a key account exec, he exceeded targets, was positive and no task insurmountable. John was confident and ambitious to move to the next level. 
He achieved his goal and promoted to commercial director.

Fired up with drive and enthusiasm John repeatedly presented in team meetings, what he thought, were exciting objectives for the next 12 months and beyond. A member of John’s team responded: “…I’ve seen it all before, it won’t work and it won’t happen, how is this any different…?” Over time John became worn down, deflated and frustrated and with this negative attitude.

He went to his boss for support, who advised: “I brought you in to shake the tree; keep shaking it and fire anyone who isn’t on board!” Anxious to show he could do this new role John shook the tree and shook it more. His team proved unyielding and even more resistant.

John came to me for coaching to sort his team. Describing them as lazy, cynical and not thinking as he did.  He couldn’t understand their short-term attitude.

I fed back to John, his team’s behaviour and attitude reflect the organisation’s culture. What he’s experiencing is mood contagion. Mood contagion is the phenomenon of having one person's emotions and related behaviours directly trigger similar emotions and behaviours in other people. In an organisational context, the leadership, communication and behaviours set the organisation tone. 

The ‘emotion’ of the organisation becomes like a virus; it’s contagious.

John had a choice, focus on what he could control or accept the status quo.  
Didn’t that clever man Einstein have a great saying about the definition of insanity? “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.

We started with an Emergenetics neuroscience-based psychometric profile giving John a tool to adapt his communication and behaviours with the aim to increase rapport and build relationships with every member of his team. 

Your Personality is Not an Excuse for Poor Communication

He learnt people see things differently than him and enabled him to increase engagement and understanding. 

Rather than just talk about the big picture and ‘great ideas’ he changed how he communicated. 

Sounds simple and common sense, but when we’re busy and under pressure, common sense doesn’t often prevail

As Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” 

John changed how he communicated and adapted his approach. He prioritised time to spend 1-1 with each team member. Over time his team meetings became more collaborative, with healthy debate and respect for different views; engagement increased. 

John became more confident and secure in his ability to be a leader and his team performing.

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Are you a Cultural Misfit?

Have you “married” the wrong organisation?

Take the example of Sue. After ten years in management with the public sector, she was ready to redefine her career and move on. She chose the charity sector where she had a passion for a cause. She set her sights high and was ready.

She landed her dream job as Head of Department with a large charity who were expanding abroad. She was committed and excited about the opportunities ahead.

Technically Sue was more than capable. She had an excellent track record in management and experience in her new sector. Sue thought everything was going well until her probationary period was extended.  Something was clearly amiss.

Although Sue received specific feedback, she became aware she didn’t fit their culture. One difference was her style of decision making. She was “too collaborative and consultative”. Sue believed her approach was right; she was aiming to increase the engagement of her team.  The organisation wanted her to be more confident, show more drive and assertion. All good leadership attributes.

However, this created a conflict for Sue. She accepted she could learn to be more assertive, but she wanted to do this without compromising her values of respecting others. The behaviours she noticed by other Heads, were aggressive and at times bordering on bullying. This approach wasn’t her style.

A few months on Sue realised she didn’t’ fit their culture, their way of doing things. Through her coaching, she learnt what she could do differently next time:

★ Become self-aware. What are your blind spots? How do others perceive you? Are they right? How would you know?

★ What are your values? Determine what’s important to you. Our values shape our identity, give us direction and affect how we make decisions.

★ Develop resilience. Even top performers experience setbacks. Dust yourself down, learn what you can do differently, get back up again.

★ Become flexible. Adapt your behaviour to ensure good communication and rapport. This isn’t about compromising your integrity, but being adaptable to different situations.

Realise sometimes there are things you just cannot influence and maybe it’s better to walk away than stay ‘married’ to the wrong organisation.

In hindsight, Sue acknowledged she could have approached her first 90 days differently, and made different decisions. 

The good news is, she has proved she is resilient and landed another Head of Department job in the charity sector and thriving!

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Appraisals aren't just for Bosses

As year-end approaches many organisations will be embarking on annual appraisals.  The process is often seen as little more than a tick box exercise with the same comments reported each year with little significant meaning resulting in a thankless task.  HR spend a lot of time coercing people into doing them while managers look for a variety of other priorities to delay the process, often resulting in appraisals being incomplete or rarely done.

Proactively Develop Your Career

For many managers and employees alike they hate the thought of them finding it an uncomfortable practice, undertaken for the wrong reasons and from the wrong perspective. This can result in putting the manager and the employee on opposing sides.   The employee may feel defensive or expect an unfair review.

If done right however appraisals can be an invaluable feedback tool for managers and a powerful tool for developing your career.

Utilise the appraisal process as an opportunity to raise your profile, to be formally and officially recognised.  Here are a few things you can do:

·         Well in advance ask for a copy of the appraisal form. Become familiar with it. If necessary clarify with your line manager and/or HR any sections you don’t understand.

·         Ideally you should have received confirmation of your yearly objectives.  Have the strategy or any processes changed making them no longer relevant or obsolete?

·         Without blame or being harsh on yourself, objectively and critically evaluate your own reasons for any shortfalls. If you haven’t met your targets have you had access to the right resources? Start to think about how you could go about achieving these targets in the coming year. What could you do differently?

·         Against your key objectives complete a self-assessment and determine your development needs. Assess your skills, knowledge and experience required to do your job satisfactorily and assess the same criteria to achieve above expectations.  Identify your strengths as well as any gaps. Start to think about how to proactively develop any short falls.

·         Are you ready and capable of taking on more responsibility? Are you ready to step up? What else could you do in the coming year to add more value to your organisation?

The appraisal process is not an exclusive tool for managers to assess performance, be proactive and manage your career by taking ownership of your appraisal, thereby ensuring it is meaningful and worthwhile.

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How To Achieve Maximum Engagement and Increase Motivation

I often find leaders despair about how to get more from their teams. In frustration they cite "we provide great incentives such as bonuses, flexitime, extra holidays and it seemingly has little impact…" A global study by Gallup (2013) found that only 13% of employees are engaged in their job, meaning that they are emotionally invested in and focused on creating value for their organisations every day.

Full engagement is critical to growth and maximising performance. A further study found businesses with the highest engagement scores averaged 18% higher productivity than those with the lowest engagement scores.

Some of the key points that impact engagement include the boss, the individuals themselves, other people and team dynamics, organisation strategy, culture of the organisation and communication. This last point is interesting considering that in a recent survey published by Harvard Business Review (2015), 91% of employees said communication issues are seriously demotivating. Some of the other top issues being cited included:

-        Not recognising employee achievement

-        Not giving clear direction

-        Not making time to meet

-        Not offering constructive feedback

-        Not knowing employees names

How do we get the best out of ourselves and our employees?

The big question organisations want to know is how to achieve maximum engagement and increase motivation.  At a fundamental level people want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’  Career aspects such as financial security, working in a great team, career opportunities, being challenged, flexibility and being able to see how their job makes a difference are all key to maximising engagement.

Leaders and managers should of course expect high performance and contribution from employees. However, full engagement occurs with an alignment of maximum job satisfaction and job contribution. Here are some factors to think about to influence engagement and motivation:

1.     What impact does our leadership style have on how employees feel? Does it hinder or enable best performance?

2.     Wellbeing - how do staff feel about pressure and the balance between work and home life?

3.     Personal growth: to what extent do staff feel they are stretched and challenged by their job?

4.     My manager: how do staff feel towards their immediate boss?

5.     My company: how do people feel about the company they work for?

6.     My team: how do the staff feel about their immediate colleagues?

7.     Fair deal: how happy is the workforce with their pay and benefits?

Whether you’re the boss or employee, what can you do to put engagement and motivation on the company wide agenda? Get this right and get superstar performance from all your employees.

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Taming the Email Beast

Today most of us are displaying symptoms of being time starved. Feeling constantly tired, groaning at the thought of another meeting, and particularly groaning at our in-box which is the biggest time thief of all.

Today we’ve forgotten how emails revolutionised communication. Enabling faster responses and better services for our customers. Time is money so anything that can be done faster, more efficiently has to be a good thing. Initially it felt great to keep on top of emails in the evenings, weekends, holidays, making us feel in control.

20 years on and herein lies the paradox emails are now the beast to tame.  Bosses, peers, teams, customers, everyone expect immediate responses and if not chase with another email.

Email Overwhelm

Research indicates businesses lose US$650 billion p.a. due to unnecessary emails, with the average worker costing their employer an annual US$10,000 because of distractions such as emailing.  Constantly dipping in and out of emails increases distractions, reduces the ability to concentrate rendering a worker less effective. From a neuro-scientific view our brains aren’t wired to multi task, we perform better if focusing on 1 thing at a time.

Other detrimental effects include the inability to build rapport with our work colleagues; no one makes the time to talk with each other unless chasing an email!

Emails have created an addictive way of behaving – stressing out “in case I miss something” and so it calls for a radical change. Some organisations are doing just that and banning internal email.  What can you do at an individual level?

• Try an email detox for 1 day of the week. Auto respond with you’re having an email detox and please call on number...
• Raise the bar on the detox – do it for a week.
• Set up a permanent auto responder that says you will only reply to external emails

If these leave you feeling cold turkey start with simple boundaries:

• No emails between 10am – 4pm. Pay a forfeit if you break this rule to the company’s chosen charity.
• When you’re at home switch off the mobile.
• Set up a self-help group “12 steps email addiction recovery programme”

By taking control of emails you’ll gain extra time, it will directly reduce stress and increase how much you achieve each day and with that, increased job satisfaction.

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It Takes All Kinds of Brains to Make a Perfect Team

If your team isn't cognitively diverse, you're missing a huge opportunity

Creating a Perfect Team - Thinking out of the box

Have you ever wondered why a team of smart, experienced people aren't performing well? It's not owing to a lack of skills. More likely there's a breakdown in something deeper that precludes the group's ability to generate ideas, get things done, or perform at high levels.

This can happen as a result of many things, but in my mind, it really breaks down to two factors.

1. Does the team have the diversity of thought to come at things from different perspectives or is it a one-note band?

2. Even if there are multiple perspectives, does the team have the requisite openness, trust, and communication to allow divergent thinking and ideas to flourish?

From Emergenetics research into psychology and human behaviour, we know that thinking is manifested in four distinct areas--conceptual, social, analytical, and structural. We also know that every person's behaviour falls somewhere along a spectrum in each of three arenas--expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility.

Cognitive Diversity: The Golden Ring

Teams that exhibit a full spectrum of these seven attributes are the goal. We call it a Whole Emergenetics, or WE, approach to team building, and it is incredibly powerful in practice.

It's easy to see how this approach works--diverse teams have all the tools at their disposal. They're critical thinkers, innovators, and organized and empathic all at once. They can be accommodating or firm, process internally or be gregarious, and be peacekeepers or drivers, whatever the task requires.

Diverse teams have the ability to see every perspective and put the strength of each individual team member to work toward the common goal. Teams that lack that diversity are unbalanced in one way or another, and that imbalance erodes effectiveness over time.

A group leaning heavily toward one thinking preference may excel in the formation of ideas but lack the ability to formulate a clear plan and see the project through to the end. Or be great at planning and follow-through but short on ideas.

Another group may have the potential to embrace diverse speaking but not actually value or elicit all perspectives. A team led by a few driving, gregarious people may never let others speak, especially those on the quiet end of the expressiveness spectrum. Valuable thinking and ideas are lost.

How to Achieve It

Chances are, you're not going to just stumble across a cognitively diverse team in the wild. You need to be deliberate. If you have a tool like Emergenetics to uncover preferences, that's great, but if not, you can apply these tactics.

Ask for volunteers to fulfill roles. If you're a team leader, you can see inklings of how team members think. Ask the team for volunteers who can naturally bring a perspective of analytical, structural, social, and conceptual thinking to the table. Make sure they're responsible for the perspective. Do the same for expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility--you need representation from across each spectrum.

Put tasks and projects into a diverse approach. Any initiative the team works on can be seen through the lens of cognitive diversity. If you're having a meeting, ensure that you approach it from all seven attributes. As you come up with solutions, put each into a framework and test it against the full thinking and behavioral spectrum--does the solution speak to analytical concerns, for example? Is it resonant for structural thinkers? Ask this question for each attribute.

The potential for cognitive diversity exists for all groups and teams whether they are naturally diverse or not. In reality, unbalanced teams exist. What's important is that you as a leader are in touch with the team dynamic and take a deliberate approach to assigning work and creating teams. With conscious effort, balance can be achieved, and potential unlocked and channeled into results.

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Successful Managers - the Fundamentals

Newly promoted managers which despite their past success can often struggle with their new responsibilities. Its classic isn’t? You’re good at your job, you get promoted to the high echelons of management, and then find yourself struggling. I know what’s like having walked in those shoes.  The solution is straightforward, but before highlighting this I’d like to mention, the 5 greatest challenges managers worry about: sales, profitability, managing people, costs and competitors.

So given this, why is a common oversight frequently made, where managers focus on the ‘hard processes’ of strategy, targets and policies, to the exclusion of ‘soft skills’ of managing people?  Let me highlight the priority by asking, in your team what’s the hardest to improve or change? Is it learning new skills, or experience or changing someone’s attitude? The answer is pretty obvious.

‘The Sunday Times Best 100 Companies’ to work for have recently been announced for 2014 and it’s interesting to note the theme across all these organisations; namely, good leadership and management; teamwork and communication. It is these soft skills if applied consistently and in balance with the ‘hard processes’ make for a successful manager.

So, here are the fundamentals for new managers:

1.  Team Climate: as a manager part of your role and responsibility is to create the culture that enables high performance. This sets the foundation for everything else that follows. You can do this by ensuring people’s behaviour and attitude are aligned to your organisation’s values. Hold people to account for bad behaviours. Do be constructive and when needed be assertive with your feedback.

2.   Effective Communication: Engage all staff and aim to influence others. Listen, be in tune with what’s not being said. The grapevine is your barometer of what’s truly going on. Is your style of communication adding to your team’s issues? Are your team confident to feedback upwards? If not, why not?

3.   Build positive relationships: make the time and develop genuine rapport particular with others where it doesn’t come easy. This means building trust, respecting different points of view and holding judgement.

4.   Manage Performance: ensure clarity of objectives, forward planning, manage resources to ensure objectives are met; and communicate; go back to step 2.

5.   Manage inappropriate behaviours: get the balance right of holding yourself and others to account in an appropriate way. Without compromising trust or respect give consistent feedback that keeps others engaged, committed and motivated; back to step 1.

6.   Give Praise. Make it your mantra to catch someone doing something right every day. Doesn’t have to be complicated or over the top, a simple thank you goes a long way to influencing your team’s motivation and commitment.

And the final building block is Confidence. Believe in yourself. You can and will be a successful manager.

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What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Based on my own research what keeps leaders most awake at night are:

1 Growing sales and a full pipeline

2 Managing profitability

3 Managing employees

4  The Competition

This month I want to bring the spot light onto Performance.  ‘Management Today’ found that British Managers often shy away from having difficult conversations about performance – and if they do have to take the plunge, quite often make a hash of it.  However not managing performance more frequently results in:

·         Low teamwork

·         Conflict

·         Blame Culture

·         High staff turnover

·         Mediocre results

Is there any organisational practice more broken than performance management? Everyone hates it – employees and managers alike.  Very few do it well with the performance management programmes becoming organisation wallpaper. They exist in the background with little or no expectations for impact.

Yet despite its poor popularity, performance management at both an individual and organisational level is critical to business success. It can’t just be ignored.

So what are the 4 essentials to transform performance management so that it becomes a key contributor to business success?

1. Link performance management to business strategy

At the end of the day, you and your leadership team will be judged in terms of how successful you have been in achieving your business strategy. You need to measure the right things to establish whether you are on or off track in terms of achieving your strategy. You will only do this if your performance management system is clearly linked to your business strategy.

2. Clarity of Objectives – Critical Success Factors

The critical success factors are the key levers that need to be operating optimally if the desired results are to be achieved. You need to be able to clearly define what those critical success factors are and ensure all department, team and individual’s objectives are aligned on the same page.

3. Evaluate and Measure

Financial measures are the most common in many organisations.  It is equally important to have a range of non financial measures which focus on areas like customer satisfaction, productivity and innovation.

4. Involve people

As a leader, don't fall into the trap of developing performance measures in isolation. Often those closest to the delivery of the service or making the product have the greatest insights into what is most critical to success. Make sure you use that expertise to get results for the organisation.

At the end of the day, performance management is a practical tool and if done simply can be a real contributor to organisation success. So what steps do you need to take in order to gain real benefits from your performance management system?

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The 3 Eee’s of Leadership...Engage, Empower, Enable

Andre Villas Boas at 35 is the youngest manager to win the Europa League (with FC Porto). “Being a manager is all about emotions. I remember hearing about the Boston Philharmonic maestro whose biggest breakthrough as a leader was realising he didn’t actually make any sound himself; only his players did. He had to lead them but by harnessing their emotions.”

As a leader how do you win the hearts and minds of your team? A common theme I come across is “my team are lazy/I make all the decisions/what’s the point of delegating”.  However if you step back you just might see a different perspective.

Your leadership style is directly reflected back by your team’s performance and overall results.

Louise was excellent at her job and was recently promoted to management. She was fired up with best intentions and ideas to get more out of her team. Within a few months the team were disengaged, she was stressed, working longer hours and doubting her capability as a manager.

Her previous excellent relationships turned to mistrust, the team did not support her or the new ideas. Her boss questioned if he’d made a mistake in promoting her.

During our coaching Louise had time to reflect and see what was going wrong. The old style of management, control and command, is a fast route to a disengaged and demotivated team resulting in lower performance. There are times for this style such as crises or safety issues however, modern day managers lead by engaging and empowering their team enabling their organisation to achieve its objectives.

Louise changed her approach. She fed back to each individual what they did well, asked what were their challenges and what support did they need.

She set up regular informal one-to-ones; she learnt to listen and to give constructive feedback. She led with a coaching style of management, asking questions not telling, opening a 2-way dialogue. Occasionally Louise would fall back to old habits, however trust and rapport was now stronger and her team could give her feedback.

An engaged team become empowered and enabled to make better decisions; they accept accountability and are motivated to do more.

Invest in engaging your team and individuals. What can you do to empower them? Get it right and watch your team and the results soar.

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We think we're clever but are we really, Aristotle saw through it all

2000 years ago Aristotle wisely said We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. So what does this really means?

Our minds think about what it is most exposed to. What most occupies your thoughts shapes your perception and reality.  Your mind will reflect whatever it gets exposed to. 

What are you exposing other people to when they look at your behaviour? Do you pollute your mind with excuses, self pity, lack of integrity, inconsistency, apathy, sarcasm, gossip, procrastination, mediocrity, fear, worry, anger? These all negatively impact your results. 

Your mind thinks about what it is exposed to all the time. What impact does this exposure have on your performance?

Sometimes we can get so caught up in the fast pace of the 21st century, new technology driving our lives but in fact human behaviour has not changed and Aristotle's wisdom continues today.

Consciously take charge and expose yourself to new ideas, stimulating conversation, and good virtuous humanity.  Expose others to your good character, sound judgement and your helpful nature. Expose people to the example you want to see.

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