Leading Comes LAST

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First you listen, then you learn, then you help, and then you can LEAD

Click the picture above and then right-click or hold to download your copy.

I love this principle, which I first learned only recently.

It comes from this article in The Atlantic, and is my paraphrasing of a quote from former US Defence Secretary James Mattis, summarising George Washington’s leadership approach.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What’s your current leadership challenge?




Leadership, Role-modelling and Behaviour

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Leaders cannot NOT be role-models – so be the right kind

I know I keep banging on about this, but Behaviour is such an important thing for leaders to get right.

If you have any kind of authority, responsibility, power or even visibility in your organisation, other people will base their own Behaviour on yours.

This applies whether or not you’re formally called a ‘leader’ or ‘manager’ or whatever. You cannot not be a role-model; so be the right kind.

If you want to know who in your organisation sets the standard for how things are done and what’s the right way to Behave with each other – take a look in the mirror. If you find yourself complaining or worrying about some aspect of the culture in your business, the person looking back at you from that mirror is the one who sets the tone.

People sometimes ask me, “Well, what do you even mean by ‘Behaviour’?”

The answer is simple – everything you do and everything you say.

What makes things tough for leaders and anybody who wants to manage their own Behaviour, is that what you say and do on the outside is actually the end result of a long chain of stuff that happens inside our heads and bodies – and which is often largely unconscious.

To make a start in managing your own Behaviour I recommend two simple actions:

  • First, as you interact with others, be very clear about what outcome you want to achieve. Behaviour without Intention is not managed. Remember:

You cannot hit a target which is not there

  • Second, have some kind of ‘Reflective’ practice. The best way is to keep a diary or journal where you can reflect on your day and set your intentions for the next.

You know yourself mostly by your thoughts. Everyone else in the world knows you only by your actions. Remember this when you feel misunderstood. You have to do or say something for others to know how you feel.

James Clear

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach.

What aspects of being a role-model, or of Behaviour at work are important to you?




One Page Leadership

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What should leaders actually *do*?
The whole of Leadership on one page, free download, no sign-ups.

Click the picture above and then right-click and select ‘Save as…’ to download your copy.

Inspired by some work a client organisation was doing this week, I wanted to get the whole of my mental leadership checklist to fit on one page.

These are the factors I’ll typically run through when I’m coaching someone in a leadership role and want to help make sure they’re covering all the bases that their role demands.

It’s useful for newly-appointed leaders and well-established leaders who want to keep their approach fresh.

This is not the only way of thinking about leadership, but if you include all of these aspects, you can’t go too far wrong.

(This simple structure can also be especially useful in situations where people don’t already think of themselves as “leaders”, even when they’re responsible for and reliant on the work of several other people.)

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach.

  • What aspects of your own leadership do you like to regularly check on
  • What advice would you give to other people who aren’t sure about their leadership?

You are amazing

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When you get to really see people for who they are, their light and their dark, they are truly inspiring!

Maybe I’m just in a good mood at the moment (although it’s lasted quite a long time if that’s the case) but I’ve been finding lots of my coaching clients very inspirational just lately. And for a man who’s a natural cynic, that’s a nice place to be.

I love my work and one of the great gifts it brings is the opportunity to see people for who they really are. By which I mean to notice and understand the whole person (to the extent that you ever can). Their light and their dark together.

I frequently find myself thinking how amazing this person sitting in one of my client chairs actually is. Not because of what they are doing in their life and work – although lots of my clients do do amazing things. And not because they’re a ‘good’ person either.

For me it’s a kind of gut sensation. As we’re coaching together, if you’re lucky, you build up a picture of somebody: their light and dark, their strength and weakness, their kindness and cruelty, their aspirations and their fears.

Often in the coaching I get the chance to say what I’m seeing – we call this a ‘Recognition’, and it might go something like this:

“I see your commitment to this project you’re leading, even though you sometimes doubt your abilities and don’t know how it’ll work out. That’s courage, right there.”

And for every one of those Recognitions I’m able to say out loud, there are several times when a bit of my brain is lost in wonder at the sum of somebody’s parts.

I often think that mine is one of those jobs where you don’t really need to look too hard for inspiration. It comes and sits in one of my client chairs and is ready to reveal itself if I look and listen well enough.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter

Yoda

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What inspiration or other qualities do you see in people if you look?



Paradoxes

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Courage follows fear – and four other important things that happen the wrong way around

Is it just me who sometimes wishes that each of these things would work the other way around for a change?

Courage follows Fear

You don’t usually get the courageous feeling until after you’ve done the scary thing, although the time that you might most want it is before.

Vitality comes from expending Energy

If you want to be more energetic, you’ve got to be regularly spending your energy on something sensible, not saving it.

Leadership follows Followership

Commitment, involvement, collaboration, ego-management, and credibility are all things best learnt first without the added need to lead.

Faith comes before Trust

If you want to be able to trust people, you’ve first got to give them the chance to be trusted – and that takes a leap of faith.

Wisdom comes after Experience

If you’re anything like me, then you need to fall flat on your face quite a lot before understanding how stuff really works. And even then, I still learn more and am surprised by how things actually turn out compared to how I thought they would.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What other things seem to paradoxically happen the wrong way around?


Motivation for Leaders

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Why my favourite go-to motivational quote still has three fatal flaws; and what leaders should do about them

This quote from Theodore Roosevelt has long been a favourite of mine for helping to motivate myself and others:

Do what you can,

Where you are,

With what you have.

– You can click and then alt-click the image above to download a copy for yourself –

Anytime I’m stuck or feeling powerless, or can’t see the route through the forest for looking at all the trees, this quote gets me unstuck and into purposeful action.

But it still has three hidden weaknesses.

Leaders who want to use this kind of thing to help other people feel motivated need to be aware of these flaws and to take extra steps to combat them.

It’s really worth doing this, especially if you’re the kind of leader who:

  1. Naturally likes to be around empowered people and to help others to raise their game; or
  2. Occasionally finds yourself wondering why other people don’t take the initiative more, or don’t work as hard as you do.

Each of the flaws I’m talking about are right there in that first line:

“Do what you can“

And this is why…

1) People aren’t always aware of just what they can do, both in terms of what they have ‘permission’ to do, and in terms of their own capabilities.

2) People don’t always believe that what they can do will actually lead to the outcome that’s needed. To take a really basic example, even though someone ‘can’ make 20 sales calls today, do they truly believe that those calls will lead to the extra business they’ve been asked to generate? If not, they won’t be motivated.

3) People don’t always know in advance if the outcome that their actions might lead to is actually an outcome that they really want. It’s not so much about them not wanting to achieve a specific outcome, but more that they just don’t really, consciously know if they do want it! I believe that this hidden flaw derails more attempts to motivate people than almost anything else.

So as well as using that brilliant quote from Teddy R, leaders who want to motivate people should also be doing these four things as well:

1a) Always give the permissions up front. This is basic delegation skills. If you’re asking or expecting someone to do something, what permissions do they have or need? What resources can they access? What approaches, methods or ways of doing it can they use or not use?

1b) Help people to assess and grow their own capabilities. Which means you really do need to encourage and show people how to learn and adapt.

2. Break the unconscious rule that people make for themselves about taking action and needing to get the correct result. Help them to be more like a scientist. Any action will lead to ‘a’ result. Get people to be curious about selecting from a range of possible actions. Have them observe the results like a scientist doing an experiment. What worked, what didn’t get the expected result, what would you try next time?

3. This is perhaps the most significant one for leaders to be doing. Encourage people to live in the future a little. This outcome that you want them to help achieve – what will that be like? What will it mean for them when it’s been achieved? How will it change or affect their day-to-day experience?

This important part of motivating people is the equivalent of getting them to try on some new clothes in the mirror before they know whether or not they want them.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach What do you think of that Roosevelt quote? Does it help you motivate yourself and others? What also works for you?

More on Outcome Focus

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Is this the most powerful question you can ever ask?

One of the best things a leader or a coach can do for somebody is to ask them:

“What do you want to have happen?”

This simple outcome-focussed question can do so much:

  • It can raise someone’s head up and out of whatever problems they’re stuck in
  • It can focus effort and attention in a really personal and energising way
  • It can create unique moments of clarity and even stimulate big changes in direction.

You can use this when you want to address conditions in someone’s personal or professional life; when they’re working on a project and need to plan and progress it; and you can use it when you want to motivate and build on success, or even when things aren’t going well.

Sometimes you need to ask the same question, maybe in a slightly different way, several times in a row.

People can avoid answering it, they can be stuck in the problem, they can even be wedded to a possible solution (rather than being clear about what they actually want).

Keep asking until you get a clear outcome statement of some desired future state that doesn’t reference the problem itself or a solution. Then you know you’ve got to the heart of what they want.

And how about you?

Thinking about what you’re working on now, or about where you find yourself, what do you want to have happen?

And who around you needs you to ask them this kind of question? Who needs that clarity and powerful attention from you just now?

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach to let me know what you want to have happen or how you’re getting on at asking other people the same.

Self-Awareness (2b): Impact and Results

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In your interactions with other people, do you always get the result you’d intended?

For a full copy, click the diagram above and then right-click to download or ‘Save as…’

If the first part of Self-Awareness is getting really clear about your Intention (see this article here), then the second, perhaps even more important part is to practice noticing your Impact in the form of the Result that you got.

What happens when you interact with someone else; and was it what you meant to have happen?

There’s a rule we use in my kind of coaching which says that:

The meaning of your communication is the response that you get

It’s tough rule to follow because it’s telling us that, no-matter what we said or did with someone, no matter what our intention was at the outset; what we actually communicated was exactly what the other person says it was – even if their interpretation or response was radically different from what we meant!

It is the meaning that they ascribe to your communication that counts, not yours.

Of course, this rule is only important if you want to have really effective interactions and communications with other people. If not, if you’re happy to say, “Well, I don’t care what they actually did in response, I told them what I wanted to tell them anyway,” then this rule doesn’t need to apply to you.

There are lots of communication skills that you can use to maximise your chances of making sure that the message and meaning you meant to communicate is what somebody else actually hears.

What I want to focus on for this article is the skill of Self-Awareness, building on that first part around being clear about your Intention. Once you’ve done that, you can turn your observer’s lens towards the Results that you get:

  • When you say something to people, are they hearing what you meant them to hear – and how do you know?
  • When you do something for somebody else, do they understand why you did it, and again, how would you know?

Awareness really is the key here. Most of the other skills are about saying or doing things in a slightly different way, often to better match the other person’s style, and with a bit of experimentation almost everybody can broaden their range and learn to match it to other people.

But you won’t even know to do that if you’re not monitoring the Impact you’re having.

So that’s the Self-Awareness skill that I’d like you to practice next. It’s the red box in the diagram above. Did your interaction with another person get the Result that you Intended – and how do you know?

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach to let me know how your Self-Awareness is doing and how you monitor the results you get from your interactions with others.

The Supportive Boss

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Leaders: 7 things your struggling employee needs to hear you say

What if you’ve got someone who works for you who is struggling? They’re maybe a little overwhelmed or out of their depth. Perhaps they’ve lost their mojo. Or they’re reacting badly and you know something is up, but not quite what it is. What is that person secretly waiting to hear from you, their leader?

Here’s seven options to start with:

“I’ve got your back. What support do you need from me?”

“I know you can come through this.”

“Your concerns are genuine and I hear them.
Can we look together at how to deal with them?”

“The reason we fall over is so we can learn to get back up.
What do you want to learn from this?”

“Here’s the bigger picture of why this is important now …”

“Stop struggling.
Take a break.
Come back to it later from this [different] angle.”

“I’ve struggled with lots of things in the past myself.
I reckon we all must do at times.
Who have you asked for help?”

I hope those help a little? Please add a comment below if they’re still open, or contact me here, or tweet me @NickRobCoach especially if you’d like to add something that a struggling employee needs to hear from their leader.

Un-F*** Your People’s Minds to Help Them Change

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If your business needs to make changes, first you need to Un-F*** your people’s minds – here’s why and how.

There’s a really powerful part of our brains that operates mostly unconsciously in the background. It runs the autonomous parts of our bodies: breathing, heart-rate and muscle-state and triggers the production of stress-hormones such as adrenaline. Recent research also shows that it tends to take most of our daily decisions for us, without us being consciously aware of the process. AND – it’s constantly on the look out for any threats to our physical or emotional safety.

There’s also evidence to suggest that, when an environmental trigger activates this part of our brain it actually shuts down our higher cognitive functions. This is thought to be another evolutionary factor; trying to think our way out of danger is just too slow for nature!

This lizard or primal brain structure, as its been called, is in charge of…

The six F’s:  Fight, Flight, Fear, Freezing-up, Feeding and Fornication

… all the stuff that humans need to do to make sure we survive individually and as a species.

With all this going on, literally in the back of people’s heads, is it any wonder that introducing a change at work is so fraught!?

What you want to do is to get people on board with the change, and to start using their higher cognitive functions to understand and make the most of what it’s about. But you can’t do that when this really powerful evolutionary mechanism is hijacking their heads.

First, you’ve got to Un-F*** their minds.

You’ve got to take each of those Six-F’s and see them from your people’s point of view. Anytime you want to introduce a change at work, either in the way things are done or structured, or in anything that might have an impact, its essential to consider each of the Six-F’s.

In other words, you’ll need to Un-F people’s minds!

Only by being prepared to allay people’s concerns on all of these levels can you hope to avoid major resistance (which is largely unconscious, don’t forget). Make some breathing space for people to consciously understand what your change is really about and how they can positively and actively be part of it, by addressing each of these:

  1. What is there in your proposed changes that people would Fight against?
  2. What might have them Flying out the door rather than see your changes through?
  3. From their point of view, what is there to Fear in your proposed changes?
  4. What in your change is so complicated, fraught or difficult that instead of getting stuck into it, people just Freeze?
  5. How will it affect their ability to Feed themselves and their families?
  6. And I’ll leave this last one for you to ponder – how will your changes impact people’s Fornication!!?

Please let me know in the comments below if they’re still open, or by tweeting me @nickrobcoach, what you’re finding out about introducing change at work and how (or whether) you need to deal with the 6-F’s.