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There are so many instances in our lives when we hesitate because we “don’t feel ready”. But what does that even mean?
Readiness is simply the courage to make a decision.
You can still actually be ready when one or more of the following are present:
- Changes you still want to make
- Thoughts you still haven’t explored
- Relevant things you still don’t know
- Fear that you’ll fail
- Uncertainty that you’re making the right choice
Making a decision can feel rather arbitrary, and there are tons of resources if you want help with that. In the end, the only thing that validates your decision is your commitment to it.
Readiness is the commitment to choice, and all the freedom that comes with it.
A client recently asked me a great question. He said “I’m bringing on a new employee, and I really want to build ownership in this person as soon as possible, but there’s also a lot of training I need to give them. What is the balance between giving my employee a lot of autonomy right away, but needing to also dump a ton of training information on him?”
Ownership is the degree to which the employee feels that his tasks, role, and job are his. Giving an employee the chance to make his own choices can build ownership rapidly. My client was afraid that in the past he’d given too much autonomy too quickly and left his new workers feeling unclear and unsupported in their role. He wanted to find a way to continue to build ownership but not sacrifice a solid training regimen.
I first suggested that the two concepts were not mutually exclusive. The new hire could have a high degree of ownership over his new role (and high ownership is more natural for some than others) and at the same time be ready to soak up all of the guidelines and training information. It made sense, however, that granting immediate autonomy might not be the best way to build early ownership, so I shared with my client three simple tips on other ways he could build ownership through the training process.
1. Leave space in the training time for lots of questions.
Even though you are introducing a lot of new information, make it as close to a two-way dialogue as you can. By leaving room for questions, you’re showing that the outcome is the person’s learning, not the transaction of information.
2. Request that the employee make upgrades to the training materials.
Your new employee is experiencing the onboarding process on real time, and so he or she probably has some suggestions for how to make the materials or the process better. By doing this you’re sending the message that you value this person’s input, and therefore value him or her as a contributor from day 1. Even if the edits are for formatting, this tip still works. You let your employee have a hand in the document and now a small piece of it is “his”.
3. Share your vision.
Sharing your vision of the company and how this person’s role fits into that is a huge way to build ownership. If the person resonates with this vision, they can start to take it on as their own (and hopefully you vetted for this alignment in the interview process). More tactically, also share your vision for the training process, and that could be as simple as having an explicit training schedule. This way they will know how what they’re learning fits together with everything else they’ve learned.
No matter what stage of growth or what activity you are engaging in with your employee, you can build ownership by simply taking a “coach approach” to the interaction. See them as a human being, leave space for their ideas, and listen to and value their input.
Whenever you’re creating something, you’ll never see it in the flesh before you see it in your mind. Envisioning something that you believe in is the first element in The Nine Elements of Authentic Leadership because it is essential to great leadership.
One of my favorite definitions of leadership is ‘the ability to take a concept from idea to reality.’ This, while leaving out the interpersonal aspects of great leadership, does leave room for an endeavor to be that of an individual or a large company, and implies all the inspiration and action that must happen to get to that final reality.
The reason I’m writing this is because it’s not always easy to believe it in order to, one day, maybe, get to see our vision become reality. We plug ourselves into groups, belief structures, and circles of friends who will help us believe.
Leadership is a grand act of creativity. Because we’re creating something that wasn’t there before, of course we can’t see it until it exists! Why, then, does this gap feel so dark sometimes?
As our visions unfold, we co-create them by interpreting them and drawing conclusions about what we see. And that’s what this post is about. Look for clues that confirm your beliefs. Now, I’m not saying to go into denial if there’s something grossly unrealistic about your vision, but rather when your vision has started to unfold, become a co-creator by looking for the evidence that it is working out. Let the reality you see unfolding recalibrate your vision if necessary. Point to, honor, and cherish the affirming clues so that they, in turn, add fuel to that fire in your belly that dreamed the dream.
How easily we forget to do this for ourselves.
It is so compelling to set goals. The initial enthusiasm with which we boldly declare, “I’m going to do THIS!” makes us wonder why we didn’t set out to do it sooner. We entertain an idealized picture of ourselves completing this goal with ease.
And then, the rubber meets the road. The day when we marked our calendar to get the bulk of the work done, it just doesn’t happen for one good reason or another. The picture in our minds of ourselves whipping past the finish line begins to fade.
There’s a reason we often call these stretch goals. They’re not everyday activities. There IS something different about them and the way they would interrupt, or augment, our daily routine. Hence, there would be something we have to change about ourselves in order to accomplish the goal.
How many of us were thinking this when we set the goal? We talked ourselves into the goal with a picture of ease, and changing something about ourselves is hardly the epitome of ease.
My favorite definition of identity is from Wikipedia: “In philosophy, identity (also called sameness) is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable”.
The way we define and recognize ourselves must change in order to achieve a goal.
Even if it’s of the tiniest amount, this is true. And in a comfortable, everyday setting we gleefully call this growth, or even more gleefully, “personal growth”. But when the goal is truly a stretch…the hard work comes in the redefining and the re-cognizing ourselves as someone who can and will do this. You might find yourself thinking, “but I’m not someone who does X”. Try noticing that and following it with “maybe I wasn’t, but I am now”.
When I say “someone who can and will do this,” I say “will” with deliberation, because “want” just won’t work in the same way. A willingness will cut through any misaligned desire, and our desires may be very well misaligned in the presence of a stretch goal because our egos do not like change.
To make this post useful for you, let me offer some guidelines on what will help you get through the identity shift that accompanies a stretch goal. You will have to force yourself through this chasm to arrive at the other side.
- Create a container – a time and in which you are willing to sit with (and hopefully work on) your goal.
- Make the decision that you are willing to sit, however uncomfortably, in that container for your specified period of time whether you work on the goal or not. Choose to own any lack of progress you make should you decide you don’t “feel like” working on your goal.
- Choose to be present to every ounce of discomfort (and pleasure) that putting yourself through this process reveals. Being present to it means that you’re not shying away from it, which means you will ultimately integrate the discomfort and watch it dissipate.
- Be compassionate with yourself.
You can see how each of these guidelines is ultimately you showing up to yourself as honestly, compassionately, and seriously as you can. Paradoxically, this level of intentional commitment creates room for playfulness, improvisation, and creativity.
One point in the book Resonant Leadership is that the authors have made that has stuck with me is that leaders need to take time for reflection.
Reflecting on oneself fosters awareness. Awareness is key to effective leadership because it allows you to relate to others and understand situations more objectively. Reflection allows you to gain insight in situations so that you can improve your impact in them the next time around.
Do you make time in your daily or weekly schedule for reflection? You can build time to reflect in the following ways:
running
walking
swimming
hiking
cycling
meditating
quiet mornings
as you fall asleep
during a meal
Reflection is most easily done solo, and if you’re an introvert this will come naturally. As an extrovert, you might have to be more intentional about carving solo time into your schedule.
Post a comment and share how you usually make time for reflection in your schedule.
The Enneagram is my favorite personality typing tool. The reason is because it’s so much more than that. When used correctly and understood deeply, it provides a window into our souls, giving us insight into our deepest wounds and on our path to returning to wholeness.
The prefix “ennea” is Greek for “nine” and gram refers to the way the types are laid out in a systemic diagram. There are nine personality types, or ways of being. We all have all nine types within us, and we each have a dominant type. That dominant type does not change over time, although the more emotionally healthy we become, the more we integrate the other eight types. That may make it difficult for us to be able to recognize our type.
There are some great resources out there to learn more about the Enneagram. My go-to website is that of The Enneagram Institute. Two of my favorite books are The Essential Enneagram, by David Daniels and Virginia Price, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types.
If you’re new to the Enneagram, it might takes you awhile to figure out which type you are. Once you land on it though, you’ll sense a resonant truth that is only felt with that type.
This tool is the most insightful and most comprehensive personality tool I’ve come across. It not only addresses behavior – common for a personality tool – but it holds wisdom of the more powerful dimension: motivation. The secrets to why we do what we do, think how we think, and feel how we feel, can be unlocked by learning our Enneagram type.
Mike Williams survived the blowout on The Deepwater Horizon and he shared his story on 60 Minutes in May. What I found fascinating, in addition to how he survived, was his description of a catalyzing moment in the board room, just one of the many leadership mistakes that led to the disaster.
The rig had been working for seven years, and was just finishing up the largest drilling project to have ever been completed. The crew was preparing to close the cap of the oil well. Managers from BP were on site to celebrate a successful completion.
Here’s an excerpt from the 60 Minutes interview explaining what happened the morning of the accident:
Williams says, that during a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted.
“I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said ‘Well my process is different. And I think we’re gonna do it this way.’ And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge,” Williams said.
The largest environmental disaster in US history starts because of chest bumping! This may not be surprising, but it certainly is ridiculous, disappointing, and embarrassing.
This highlights the importance of communication in the engineering world. I was told that the technical communications course I took senior year at Cornell would be the most important course I took. And I’ve found that to be true. What if there was a way (and there is) for those two men to have seen themselves on the same team, to have put their different ideas in a pile, then agreed on a way discuss the project that would result in the best all-around process? What if they were trained in how to maintain sight on the bigger picture, on all the forces at play, and not just on being “right”? What if the system was set up so that “being right” was the same thing as “finding the right answer together”?
Later in the segment we learn that if BP hadn’t won the argument, there probably wouldn’t have been a blowout:
In finishing the well, the plan was to … place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid – what drillers call “mud” – to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the “mud” before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.
“If the ‘mud’ had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?” Pelley [the CBS interviewer] asked.
“It doesn’t look like it,” Bea [the expert; a UC Berkeley engineering professor] replied.
In all the cleanup work and ongoing efforts to stop the leaking, let’s not forget how this clusterf*** started. The way we’re working together IS. NOT. WORKING.
We need to:
- Bring real leadership and communication training to all ruff-n-tuff engineering leaders out there
- Teach leaders how to deepen their identity to Self so they get their egos out of the damn way when solving technical problems that have widespread, multifaceted implications.
- Provide technical leadership tools and processes for the skill of communicating so that when differing ideas are put on the table there is a reliable, impersonal way to choose the best one.
We NEED to change the way we solve problems together if we are ever going to a) avoid the next mega-disaster and b) fix all the mega-disasters that are already ruining our planet.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml
We all know that physical feeling we get when we hold back on speaking our truth. Some situation calls us forth, stirs within us a desire to speak. And something else blocks it. Below are three simple ways to create an environment where speaking your truth is more comfortable. Hopefully more comfortable than tolerating that pit in your stomach.
Three ways to speak your truth with greater ease and confidence:
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Set lots of context
The way you frame some uncomfortable truth can make it feel less uncomfortable for you, and help you feel less like you’re creating discomfort in the others. You may start with something like “I’m going to say something that you may not want to hear, but it’s important to me and to our relationship to be able to be completely straight with you.”
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Keep it on you
After all, it’s YOUR truth. It’s your interpretation, it’s your reaction. Careful, this doesn’t mean couching your statement in caveats; it just means not attacking or blaming. You might say something like “The way you ______ caused me to feel _____”, or “I noticed that _____”.
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Show appreciation
Finish with appreciation. Tell the person receiving your truth how much you appreciate being able to share honestly with them. This can call them to rise up and respond with compassion rather than reacting.
The effect of executing the three steps above is powerful. Stand taller in who you are and relish in the relief, peace, and joy from doing so.
I understand why “soft skills” are called “soft”. They’re intangible, immeasurable, and for the most unconscious among us, ignorable.
Just because I understand why some people describe these skills as “soft” doesn’t mean I like it. These skills aren’t soft at all. They don’t comfort us like a pillow, they don’t pad us like a down coat. They can cut like a knife and send a shudder of pain through our body. They can drop a pit into the bottom of our stomach on a moment’s notice.
Choosing to be open, to listen instead of showing all you know, to be vulnerable, to share the truth when you don’t know how it’s going to land, and to make reparations when you know you’ve wronged someone, is hard stuff.
Why should I care about said skills?
The way we experience our life on a day-to-day basis, when you boil it down, is really all there is. In other words, these skills are everything for our experience. More pointedly though, two reasons: business results and your health.
Business Results
MIT Management Professor Douglas McGregor helped bring the ideas of Abraham Maslow (the ‘hierarchy of needs’ guy) to the business world, especially the idea that our humanity is what motivates us.
Daniel Pink points this out in Drive: “People have higher drives…and these drives could benefit businesses if managers and business leaders respected them. “ Soft skills are the gateway through which our humanity sustains our work.
Personal Health
Daniel Goleman says it best in Social Intelligence: “Perhaps the most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.” Stressful relationships aren’t managed through the technical skills that we learned for our job, but rather the “soft” skills that allow us to connect.
How do I get better at “soft skills”?
Human beings are wired to connect. It’s when our workplaces become distinctly anti-human that we shun the intangible and our connectedness and associated skill level drops. You get better at “soft skills” (also known as leadership, by the way) by first opening up and making the commitment to start noticing. You then start to notice. You pay attention to personal patterns. You commit to being 100% responsible and then when something happens you actually respond to it; you ask questions.
These skills are the hardest for two reasons:
They require attention and commitment to improve, and there’s no stopping rule – no arrival destination that says “you’ve made it! You have all the soft skills you need.” If you look at the paragraph above, even the instructions on how to get better are vague, intangible, and “soft”.
More importantly, they require an extremely high degree of vulnerability as all aspects of your life integrate to either bolster or undermine our ability to be “soft”.
Your ability to learn from, manage, and improve your emotional intelligence directly affects the quality of your relationships, work product, leadership abilities, and the experience of every moment you live through.
In elementary school, we didn’t receive letter grades, we just received “S” for “satisfactory or “N” for “needs improvement”.
I was one of those teachers-pet-tries-to-be-perfect kids and so always got all Ss. Until one time in fifth grade we had a team project and I got an N in the category of “Works Well with Others”. I remember, even at that age, understanding that it must have been hard for the teacher to give me all Ss and then one glaring N. I remember understanding that she must have really meant it. And yet I remember still feeling like my ideas were the best and just wanting to run with them.
I disliked team projects in high school and college. I didn’t want to put my grade in the hands of someone else and give up control.
And look at me now, a “collaboration expert”. How exactly did that work out?
Well, one of the reasons I didn’t like working in teams was because there was no structure or process by which to operate. The thought of having to fight for my idea, and even for air time to explain my idea was tiring. I always felt like there was no way to democratically come to decisions and conclusions. And we didn’t have time to develop a democratic system for our short term projects. That would be a project unto itself.
When teams get together now to “collaborate” they often throw out structure and processes like those that exist in a hierarchy (who tells who what to do, etc.) and think it’s just going to be some open forum where “all ideas are heard”. And then they get frustrated when it doesn’t work. If we were giving each other grades like in elementary school, we’d all rate each other as “needs improvement”.
Being a collaboration expert means developing and practicing a system of collaboration that can go head to head with a hierarchical system. It’s true that all ideas will be heard, but not in the namby-pamby kumbaya way that you might imagine. A collaborative system is one where you step in fully, show up fully, are held fully accountable, and contribute as fully as you can. That ain’t easy. But it’s hard because we’re called to be ourselves, whereas a hierarchical system is hard because we’re oppressed from being who we know we can be.
We must learn to work together and we must come to prefer it. There’s really no other alternative when it comes to solving the world’s biggest problems and enabling people to become interdependent.
The reason I love being a collaboration expert now is to see people find joy and reap benefits from working well with others, rather than dread it like I used to.
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