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Here’s the handout I mention in the video, click it and then right-click to “Save as…” or download your copy:
A few experiences recently have reminded me how important this is.
I had my weekly ‘thinking morning’ in my favourite coffee shop earlier this week. New staff member is there, just finishing her training. I’m writing notes but also got my ears open and she asks the manager about the plants around the cafe. The manager says that watering the plants is on the roster, but that nobody really knows anything else about them. New staff member looks around and says: “They’re all succulents, simplest plant in the world to take care of. I’ll look after them.”
Of course, my spidey-sense is really tingling now, because here’s somebody who’s just revealed both an expertise and a sense of purpose. I decide to buy an extra coffee as an excuse to open a conversation: “I heard you mention succulents – sounds like you know your stuff about plants?”
This simple bit of listening and initial nosiness was all it took for me to hear this woman’s life-story and how this was a stop-gap job until she could work as a florist. And you can tell when just hearing someone like this, being witness to their hopes is big deal! All the succulents were well looked after and sung to that morning.
Last month I had lunch with a friend who I first met as a business acquittance a few years ago. He never misses a chance to ask if I remember what I said to him back then, during what was then a tough time for him. I don’t really remember what I said, but I do remember the impression I got of him at the time, which was of someone just hanging-on by his fingertips, with the strain showing, but also with this little flame flickering inside him, of something very important he wanted to fulfil. Just looking at the way he stood and a simple bit of listening about what he was trying to achieve was enough to reveal all of this.
The way he tells it, it went something like this:
Him: “I’m not sure if I can take this anymore, and I’m at the end of my tether“.
Me: “Sometimes, all it takes to turn things around is just hanging-on a little bit more“.
And it seems that simple homily was enough, because now he does exactly what that little flame was all about.
Then an email arrives from a former client, somebody I coached nearly 15 years ago. It’s to tell me how they’ve just made the next giant step towards realising a business plan we first crafted, on a beer mat (it’s a long story, but I kept a supply of them back then for doing just that…) , all that time ago. The email includes the line: “Do you remember when you asked me about X? That was the real turning point for me.”
Again, I don’t really remember what I said. But I remember thinking about how strong and determined this person was.
So, this is my really important learning.
That there are opportunities to say and do things which make a huge difference for people, just waiting around for us to grasp them. And that people will remember you did this for years and years.
All it takes is a simple bit of observation, listening to what they’re saying, taking in all the other impressions you have of this person. And reflecting back something true about them.
As it’s so possible to do this, why not do it whenever you can?
The best starting point for any development and growth at work, whether as a leader, a team member or just as your individual self, is the place of “self-awareness”.
And I’m talking here of self-awareness in a wide sense.
If you’re looking at self-awareness just as an emotional intelligence tool, then you’ll be focussed too narrowly, just on the awareness of your own feelings. What I want you to get, is a self-awareness about the whole you. That’ll include your drives, flaws, experiences, ambitions, assumptions, patterns of behaviour, values, resourcefulness and more. But also, and maybe more importantly, the big picture of what it’s like to be you. And what’s it like to experience who you are.
This kind of deep self-awareness really is essential to any kind of development. It’ll answer questions right down at a tactical level about what you want to be doing with your time and effort and how best to interact with the world. And it’ll act as a kind of beacon, keeping you heading towards the more important, bigger picture of what you’re about.
Sometimes this kind of self-awareness is forced upon us when something we’re trying to achieve goes wrong. Then we have to re-assess things on a personal level. And at other times, self-awareness comes out of a ‘gap’, a sense that something’s missing or unfulfilled.
Overcoming the uneasiness and discomfort around this kind of self-knowledge is important both to make sense of what’s happened so far and to move forward.
If you wanted to get some more self-awareness without being forced into it by that kind of circumstance, how would you go about it?
One of the best ways is to pretend to be your own observer.
Check out the diagram alongside. (If you click it and then right-click it, you should be able to download a copy.)
First, imagine ‘seeing’ a version of yourself. Get a sense of who this person is, and what’s important to them.
Second, imagine you could observe how this person goes about interacting with the world about them and with other people.
There are many things you could be observing and getting a sense of, but to get you started here’s some of the things I’ll typically be asking my clients about to help them develop their self-awareness. We talk about them as if they were another person, so instead of saying “what’s important to you”, I’ll get them to practice being an impartial observer of themselves by asking, “what’s important to this person?”.
Here’s some of the aspects you might be considering as you pretend to observe yourself. It’s a fairly long and deep list, so don’t feel you have to get all of this straight away:
If there’s one thing that makes the most difference between individual success and failure, or between great team dynamics and anarchy, it’s having an Outcome Focus.
That is, knowing clearly and distinctly what is wanted in any given situation.
If you don’t know what outcome you want, as a leader, an individual or as a team, it’s almost impossible to agree on how to proceed or to focus on where to put your efforts. As Lewis Carroll wrote:
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
So it’s frequently a great source of surprise to me to discover how often people don’t really know what outcomes they want. Or to find out that nobody in a team has had a chance to talk together about what they’re trying to achieve. As a leader, if you were to do absolutely nothing but talk about the top three or four outcomes you want people to focus on, I’m convinced you’d be providing more leadership support for your teams than 60-70% of the leaders I know!
But how do you have more of an Outcome Focus? How do you get clear yourself about what you want in any situation? And how do you help the people around you to have the same clarity?
If you’re ready to have more of an Outcome Focus, I’ve set out my top 3 tips below.
But before you get into those, it’s always worth checking – do you already know what outcomes you want?
Perhaps you know but haven’t said it out loud or written it down. If that’s the case, do that now.
And if that’s not the case, or if you find yourself very well able to say what you don’t want, or if you find that you know you want less of something, but aren’t sure what outcome you actually do want, read on…
1. Visit the Future – and look back
This is one of my favourite techniques, because it’s a chance to raise your head from the everyday pressures and take stock of a much bigger picture. Pick a time-frame (it doesn’t matter what: an hour, a day, a week, a decade, will all work); use your imagination to transport yourself forwards in time; take a look back to the present-day, and answer these questions:
2. Listen to Yourself Complaining
How often do you hear yourself or other people complaining about something, in this kind of way: “He said/she said…” “She did this or that…” “They don’t understand/ care/ appreciate…”?
Us coaches like to hear this kind of complaint because it’s usually a good springboard for action – after you’ve done some work with it. Here’s why it’s so useful…
Take this (edited) real example of a complaint, given to me by a client just last week:
“I’m so sick of having last-minute tasks dumped on me and my team, only to find out later that some vital piece of information was left-out so that we wasted our time responding.”
A complaint is really two different things that have understandably got mixed-up together:
First, you have to deal with the hurt or injury that you’re feeling.
Take the example above, and imagine that you’d had those last-minute tasks dumped on you. You might be feeling annoyed, disrespected, resentful of the time you gave-up over the weekend, or any of a number of emotions. And of course, emotions are useful, once we see them clearly, because they’re nature’s way of proving the energy and impetus for us to take action.
Second, you have to get really clear about the outcome that’s hidden away inside your complaint. You have to make that outcome conscious, instead of unconscious, and to turn it into some kind of request.
Using that same example again; once you’d stopped hurting about the way you were treated and were able to think rationally, what is it you’d actually want? Is there a request you might need to make? Is there a change you would want to have happen?
3. Ask Each Other Why
Young kids are great with the “Why?” questions when they’re trying to make sense of the world. But somewhere along the way, we seem to learn that asking too many “why” questions just annoys people – so we stop. But how can you have a great Outcome Focus if you don’t know why you’re doing something?
As a team member, how many times have you felt that you’re all doing something because somebody else, at some other point in time decided it was the thing to be doing? And you don’t really know why. Or you feel like maybe you were off that day, when everybody else talked about why this particular course of action was such a great idea.
As leaders or as team members, make sure you can answer these questions:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung