What do you notice about your own self-accountability? Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach
The best way to be true to your word is to be more self-accountable, and *less* self-critical. Click To Tweet
Leaders spend a lot of time asking people to get stuff done.
But how much time do you put into targeting the way you ask somebody to do something?
And particularly, how much time and attention do you pay to which is the right way to ask that specific person?
Asking someone to get something done in a way that avoids their unconscious barriers and makes the most of their natural predilections is incredibly helpful in maximising opportunities at work and in not discovering when its too late that there’s actually been no progress!
One approach that can easily help is to think about two of the dimensions that have a big impact on people’s behavioural and thinking styles at work:
For 1, their preferred Motivational Direction, that simply means do they prefer to:
For 2, their preferred Operational Mode, that means do they prefer to:
Put these two dimensions together and you’ve already got four possible combinations of how people respond to and think about the world around them. You can see this in the matrix at the top of this post.
The very best leaders already know which preferences their team members have in the way they think about and respond to the world about them. They can then adapt their approach so that when they ask somebody to get something done, HOW they ask also supports them and doesn’t actively get in the way.
Try it yourself.
Think of anything that you need to ask somebody to get done, and see if you can ask it in each of the four ways I’ve outlined in my matrix above.
What is your OWN preferred way of being asked – which of those approaches in the matrix would be most persuasive with you?
“Understanding people is much deeper than knowledge. There are many people who know us, but very few who understand us.”
Unknown
Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach
Leaders should pay more time and attention to the WAY that they ask people to get stuff done. Click To Tweet
First, there’s a Doing track.
The Doing track is important because great coaching has to be a practical, tangible thing – to result in something useful that you can see or touch or hear. It’s not possible for clients to arrive at that destination without actually Doing something.
Second, there’s an Understanding track.
The Understanding track is important because great coaching should take people beyond what’s currently possible. And that requires new ways of looking at ourselves, more understanding about how best to relate to the world around us, and a deeper sense of what’s possible for us, both as individuals and in concert with others.
Clients often have an expectation that the coaching work will only focus on one or other track – sometimes they’re unaware that there even is a second track.
They might be struggling to get something done or to make a significant change, without realising that the reason they’re struggling is that they first need some new or deeper understanding. At other times, they can be flailing around, looking for the magic bullet to make things easier, when they simply might not have tried enough different ways, or even have tried hard enough.
The trouble is, of course, that it’s not easy to tell if something we’re attempting is difficult because (a) we lack some crucial insight; or (b) we should just be trying more things, or just trying harder. This is where our tracks need to intersect and why the coaching space, somewhere to reflect on those points, is such a powerful one.
So, intersecting tracks:
Once you become conscious of the intersecting tracks and the need to be both Doing and Understanding in a way that’s pretty close to simultaneous, all kinds of fantastic breakthroughs start to appear.
“Action without knowledge is useless and knowledge without action is futile.” Abu Bakr
What’s been your experience of this – can you understand without doing? Or push what you’re capable of doing without also getting new understanding?
Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach
Great coaching has to run on two intersecting tracks – Understanding and Doing – more or less simultaneously. Here’s why: Click To Tweet
I’m writing this as the world re-opens, in stops and starts, post-covid lockdown.
And I notice that a lot of people are struggling with their Time Management. That’s understandable. So much of how we’re doing things now has had to change, that it can be difficult to find our old patterns of effectiveness. Worse, nearly everyone else is in the same situation, so that when my time-management misses a beat, it can affect several other people’s timing too.
In case it helps, here’s my six things to NOT do, if you want to have great time-management. None of these are necessarily easy by themselves, but if you or the people in your teams are finding it tricky to manage their time just now, these are the things to focus on first:
Let me know if you’ve noticed any of this too please – or what you’re finding out about time-management in the “new normal”?
Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach
What is your Time-Management NOT about? Click To Tweet
Can you meet whatever situation life and work sends you – and show others how to do the same? Resourceful people can. Resourceful people have the initiative to grasp opportunities and the ingenuity to overcome their challenges. They can make powerful decisions and help their teams and colleagues to do so too.
We have a principle in the kind of coaching I do which is about regarding everybody as resourceful.
This is such an important thing that it’s maybe one of the first points I look for when I’m working with a new client. I ask myself:
How does this person regard themselves and the people who work for them? Do they think of themselves as someone who is able to meet whatever situation arises, and who is ingenious enough to devise ways and means to overcome problems? And do they think the same of their team and their colleagues too?
Perhaps one of the main reasons why regarding yourself and others as ‘resourceful’ is so important, is because the alternative is really awful. The alternative to regarding people as resourceful, is to see yourself and others as somehow fragile and dependent.
Now, it’s true that if you bend anyone hard enough and fast enough then they might break. But that is in no way the same as being ‘fragile’. And what’s more, breaks can be mended. And it’s also true that we are all, in some way, dependent on the people around us – like the poem says, “No man is an island” – but having those kind of human links, having dependencies, is not the same as being dependent, as being unable to function at all without others.
One of the loudest complaints I hear from poor leaders is that their people: “… aren’t resourceful enough”. They wonder why nobody works as hard as them or why their team: “… don’t show more initiative”. The years have taught me that this is a 90% certain sign that this leader doesn’t regard other people as resourceful. And usually, when I get the chance to dig a little more with this kind of leader, we find out pretty quickly that they don’t really feel resourceful themselves either!
All of us have times when we lose sight of our resourcefulness. Perhaps we’ve been stretched too far out of our comfort zones too fast or for too long. Or perhaps we’ve gradually had things pile up on top of us to the point where it’s difficult to remember just what we’re capable of.
It’s taken me a long time and lots of getting it wrong along the way to discover just how important this idea of resourceful actually is. Think of it like this. If it was possible to choose between two alternative points of view, which of these do you feel is likely to be most useful?
If you could choose – which of those viewpoints would you have?
Us coaches tend to be very practical people, so we look for what works. And over the years I’ve tried a lot of things that don’t work! Now I’m pretty certain that the best leadership approach is to regard myself and others as fully resourceful.
The principle in my coaching work is that everybody has a natural ability to resolve the challenges they face and to grasp the opportunities around them.
When we forget that, or when I want to help others reconnect with their own innate resourcefulness, here are the eight steps that I follow:
Two things are important to grasp in whatever your own or other people’s definition of Resourceful is:
First, that the word itself comes from the Latin ‘Resurgere’ – which means “to rise again”. Right there in the word is an important clue. Being Resourceful does not mean never falling, it’s about getting up again when you do.
Second, being Resourceful is a ‘capability’, something which can and should be developed, learnt and practised.
I think we’re predisposed to actually look for evidence of where ourselves and others are not Resourceful. Maybe this is even more prevalent at work. Perhaps it’s because the consequences of not being Resourceful can be (or seem to be) dangerous; and that we need to compensate for them. I’m not bothered by that, it seems a natural thing to want to do. But if we want to experience more occasions of ourselves and others being Resourceful, then we’ve got to start looking for evidence of when it IS happening.
To start looking for that evidence, answer this question:
What would you see, hear, feel or otherwise notice that would let you know when you’re being Resourceful?
Once you know what Resourceful means for you or for others, and you know what evidence would let you see it was happening, two significant thought-patterns are worth exploring further. You can dive into them by answering these questions:
Your answers to those questions are the cornerstones of what some people would call an ‘empowering belief’ (kind of the opposite of a ‘limiting belief’). They’re at the heart of what might motivate you to be Resourceful, and they’re the primary clues to changing your behaviour if you want to be more Resourceful. So spend as much time exploring them as you can!
The stuff that we’re (usually unconsciously) afraid of is what most often derails our chance to be Resourceful. Being afraid of getting something wrong stops us from trying. Being afraid of looking stupid stops us from taking a risk. It’s hard to be Resourceful when your unconscious mind is afraid of what might happen if you try!
Other common fears include being afraid of getting hurt, of missing out, of failing, of letting people down, of not being good enough. There’s a lot! I’ve written about this stuff before, so feel free to browse around here. Once you stop and ask yourself honestly, what am I afraid of, or worrying about or being anxious of, it becomes much easier to see what’s going on. Don’t try to get rid of these fears – they serve their purpose – just get to the point where you’re conscious of them, and then…
Making choices, intentionally and consciously, is a very powerful (and resourceful) thing to do. Otherwise we let habit, fear and expedience run the whole show.
You can use a structure like this, if you want to help yourself or others to make powerful choices:
Remember that there’s a dynamic aspect to being Resourceful. It isn’t just a static thing, it’s about rising again when we’ve fallen or when we’re stuck or when we’re faced with another fresh challenge.
What does each part of that dynamic process feel like in your body? What do your muscles feel like? What’s the temperature of it? What feelings do you notice in your gut, in your face, elsewhere in your body? When you get to the most Resourceful part, what does that feel like? And where in your body is the centre of your own version of Resourceful?
Daft as it may sound, getting to know what your own experience of Resourceful is like in this way can be a really helpful and grounding approach.
Don’t do all of this stuff on your own. I’m a very independent person and I respect other people who like to do things by their own efforts too and I know that it really helps to be wise enough to share some of it. You can learn from, lean on and bounce stuff around with other people in a way that just isn’t possible by yourself.
Finally, I said earlier that everybody has that natural ability to resolve the challenges they face. The best way to bring that out in yourself and in others is to experiment with it. Find opportunities to be Resourceful. Get curious about what that’s like. Practice doing it like your favourite sports person would practice their skills. When you notice something isn’t working, adjust part of it, and practice some more.
The ancient Greeks had the phrase “Know thyself” chiselled on the doorway to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Real knowledge, insight and understanding about important events and people in the world around them wasn’t possible they reckoned, without first having the foundation of self-knowledge.
If that’s still true today, how do you actually go about getting self-awareness? What should you look for; and how do you do it?
I think there’s perhaps three or more important areas to consider and I’ve set out some of those below. These are often used as early as the second or third phase in my coaching approach, as they’re so fundamental to the development work we need to do after that.
This is a fairly long post for me, over 1,200 words, because I wanted to give you a rounded sense of where to be looking, what to be listening for and how it feels to be embarking, in a structured way, on this kind of self-knowledge work. What I’ve written here isn’t the only way to go about it, and even at over 1,200 words this is still only a very quick jog around the park. Anyway, I hope you find it helpful in some way.
These are the things that, at the moment at least, are intrinsically important to you. They can or might change over time or in a different context. Some may be more important than others, and that also can be fluid but, most of the time, they’re fairly consistent. Here’s my own top 5 Values:
Note that these are in ‘strings’ of words, separated by “/” because often one word by itself isn’t enough to capture everything about a particular value.
A simple way to start to uncover your own values would be to remember a time, at work or at home, when things felt like they were going great, or just right, or were especially poignant in some way. What were the circumstances of that time? What was going on around you, who was present, how did you feel?
The chances are that during that time several of your values were being quite strongly upheld. People can often begin to identify those values by reflecting on that time and getting curious about what made it so great for them.
This is about how your (mostly unconscious) mind filters out what is useful information and what isn’t and how it then represents that information, so that you can make sense of the world around you.
Since this process happens very fast and mostly unconsciously, one of the best ways to uncover your own patterns is by way of a kind of compare and contrast with other people. Look at the way they do things, and see how it compares with your own way.
Here are two examples of the kinds of things to consider:
Another important pattern became obvious to me when I got a new Satnav. My old one used to show me a map of my whole route when it had finished plotting. Only after you’d seen that ‘big picture’ screen, did it let you start navigating. But my new satnav didn’t give you that overview. Once it’d plotted a route, it just went straight to “Turn left”. I really found it difficult to trust the new satnav and would often ask my wife to just check the ‘big picture’ of the route in our tatty old road atlas, which she hated doing. Turns out, I’ve got a strong preference for thinking in big picture terms and, until I’ve done that, it’s really hard for me to get into the detail, even though I’ve trained myself (I’m an ex-accountant!) to work with detail. And my wife is the opposite, she’s fascinated by the detail, so she hated being asked to check the big picture of the route.
Again, these factors are not immutable, they can change and be changed. It’s important to not ‘adopt’ them as fixed determinants and to not use them to pigeonhole yourself or others, or to excuse bad behaviour.
It’s possible, although I don’t think it’s often that necessary, to go through about 20 or so of those key patterns as part of the coaching process in in easy conversational way with me. I don’t often do that, because I’d rather people take responsibility for their own self-knowledge than have me or some anonymous psychometric test do it for them.
As well as the kind of thought patterns I’ve described here, you could also look at key aspects of personality, such as introversion or extraversion. The important thing is to just look, listen, feel and think your way a little more consciously than normal really. The psychologist Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
What holds you back? What doubts do you have about yourself, your abilities, the kind of person you are, the way others might see you?
What things are you so unconsciously afraid of, that you’ll automatically come out fighting, even when that isn’t the best way to do things?
In what way do you sell yourself short? Or sabotage your own efforts?
What unwritten rules have you made up about how you have to “be” (e.g. a favourite of mine: “I have to be strong”)?
What shame or hurt are you carrying around about past experiences that made you feel inadequate?
I love working with fears, doubts and limiting beliefs because I see them not as ‘bad’ things, but as really useful data about what’s important to people and about how they might really shine, if they want to.
If you’re ready now to start uncovering some of your own possible fears, doubts and limiting beliefs, try completing some of the sentences below. Do it fast and without too much conscious thought:
I’m often too …………………
I need to be more …………………
I can’t seem to …………………
I should stop (or start) …………………
I mustn’t keep …………………
I shouldn’t always …………………
I must be less …………………
Every time I try to do ………….……., ……………. happens
I want to …………………, but that’s just the way things are
I don’t deserve to …………………
I ought to …………………
If you find anything at all, start celebrating, because that just might be the bit of self-knowledge that opens all the other doors. And if completing the sentences didn’t uncover anything for you, just try going back to those questions I’ve posed at the start of section 3 above and become curious about how any of those might apply to you.
After working through those three key areas, the next level of self-knowledge is to get really clear about what’s even more important to you than your patterns of thinking and your doubts and fears and about how you might apply your values to your life and your work.
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:
These are some fairly basic tactics for the leaders’ kitbag. Six ways that you should be able to apply day-to-day, even moment by moment, to help the people around you feel inspired.
Click the image above for a full-size version and/or right-click it to download a copy.
If you notice that you’re making excuses or feeling unable to apply any of these, in general or with specific people, it’s worth asking somebody else to apply them to YOU first of all. It may be that, as the leader, you’ve lost sight of your own capabilities or resourcefulness, aren’t really feeling the ‘why’ at the moment, or just need to hear something inspiring yourself first.
Over the last couple of years I’ve worked with several teams, businesses and organisations who felt that they’d become stuck and had lost a large part of the passion and hunger for what they do. As a result, they were grinding along, with every step seeming to cost a huge amount of effort, losing out on opportunities and not really addressing the problems they were facing.
I’ve used the tools and techniques described here to help the top teams in those organisations and businesses to re-energise themselves and find their own momentum to carry them along.
It’s Not Just About Strategy
Some people will tell you that, in those grinding circumstances, your organisation, team or business needs to re-asses its strategic priorities. And I think there’s sometimes some truth in that. BUT – you’ve got to do one or two other things first. Otherwise, when that strategic re-assessment is required, that also just becomes another ineffective part of the soulless grind.
It’s Not Just About ‘Why’
There’s also been a lot of interest recently in Finding Your ‘Why’.
People say, “Always start with your why” – Why did you go into that business, in that segment? – Why does your organisation or your particular team exist?
And this is a good exercise to do when you already have momentum and want to have a coherent marketing message. In fact, the WHY is one of the most powerful marketing messages there is. BUT – my experience has been, when it comes to re-energising your own business and finding that momentum that will carry your team forwards, asking “Why” can stop you dead in your tracks.
It Can Be a Virtuous Circle
I don’t know about you, but I started doing what I do because I felt I might be able to become good at it. Along the way, I had to overcome quite a few obstacles. And as I started to get better at doing it, I liked it more and more. I believe this virtuous circle is the key to re-energising your team and finding momentum, and it’s the one I’ve used successfully with those teams and businesses over the last couple of years.
At its simplest, I think people enjoy doing what they’re good at and that this enjoyment carries them over any obstacles to becoming even better at it. And that overcoming those obstacles is itself a way of getting even better.
If you want to re-energise your team, business or organisation, and find the momentum to carry them forward, you need to remind people how they’ve already lived this virtuous circle.
I’ve used lots of different tools and techniques to do this. First, because I like experimenting, finding out what works. And second, because I like to take an approach that is tailored specifically to a particular team or business, so that it is really effective and is just for them and they can own it as theirs.
Tools, Techniques and Guiding Principles
Amongst these tools and techniques, there are three guiding principles that I think should always be present:
1. Time
It’s so easy when you’re in the busy day-to-day of running things to forget your story. We tend to focus on what needs to come next and forget to look back, at what’s already happened. As Bob Marley sang:
If you know your history, then you will know where you’re comin’ from…
I’ll always include some way of representing the journey of that team and business from the past through the present. And along the way they’ll also get a chance to remember what they had to overcome to get there and what they had to become good at doing.
There are many different ways to anchor that journey over time, so that the exercise can breathe some life into their experience, but the best ways usually seem to…
2. Play to Their Strengths
For example, if this is a team who are good at thinking in logical steps, I’ll use a ‘spatial anchoring’ technique, marking the timeline of their business along the floor and re-tracing their steps from the past to the present. If they’re a team who listens well, I might have different members represent key points along the timeline, and tell the story of that point as the group moves along. I’ve asked video production companies to make a visual vignettes of their business’s journey. One organisation I visited used bright colours and diagrams everywhere, so I asked them to colour-code and map-out the obstacles they’d had to overcome and the things they’d enjoyed along the way. Another business, good at summarising and explaining to each other, were asked to peg out cards to an impromptu washing-line, each card briefly describing their experiences over the 15 years since their business was founded.
Once you’ve got the timeline represented in some way, with a good recollection of the obstacles they’ve had to overcome and the things they’ve become good at doing, you need to make sure there is…
3. Space for the Future
I don’t know about you, but I want room to grow into. I want to know that there is space and potential in my future. Not too much space, because I don’t want to be rattling around not knowing where to go, but enough space to house my ambitions.
I think teams and businesses are the same. The people that breathe life into those teams and businesses unconsciously need to see, feel and understand that there is a supporting structure that has enough space for an enjoyable future.
This is the key to the second part of what you’re trying to achieve – as well as re-energising them, you need keep them going. To create momentum to carry this team into the future.
Whatever technique you’ve used to represent their journey so far, make sure that it can also extend easily and spaciously into the future. So, for example, if you use the ‘spatial anchoring’ technique described above, make sure there’s also room along the floor to include the future without cramming it into a corner.
Recreate that virtuous circle for your team, business or organisation. Help them to re-live the overcoming of obstacles that got to where you are now, to reconnect with the things you’ve become good at along the way. If you can do that, then I think you are most of the way there to re-energising and rediscovering that enjoyment. If you can do it in a way which deploys those three principles of: Time, Playing to your Strengths and creating Space for the Future, then I believe you will also find the momentum you want.