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Are You an Authentic Leader?

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

In today’s world of organizations there is a real desire for authentic leadership. Being an authentic leader means you must understand how you relate to others and then learn to adjust your behaviour accordingly to deal with others in a positive manner. The key is to be in the positive. If you are feeling frustration or anxious or any other negative feeling or behaviour, it is impossible to be an authentic leader.

So authentic leadership also means you must understand what upsets you, and then work to improve your self-control. Once you know your ‘hot-buttons’ you can learn how to manage them, and reach your goals despite them. Most importantly, you must understand that you may not be objective when you think about yourself – how others actually see you can be quite different from what you think they see.

Leadership talent is fast becoming a premium commodity on a global scale. This trend is driven in part by North American and European demographic shifts where the executive-age population nears retirement. Meanwhile in India and China the market for executive leadership is growing faster than their business schools can graduate suitable candidates. Most middle and front-line managers that are whizzes technically are being overlooked as potential executive candidates due to a lack of the emotional and behavioural intelligence required to lead and manage a large organization at an executive level. In addition, the current global economic conditions place huge constraints on companies both in terms of financial investment in leadership development and in terms of the time investment necessary to personally mentor the next generation of leaders for emotional and behavioural intelligence skills.

Of all the competencies that go with emotional and behavioural intelligence, the competency of self-awareness is probably the most difficult, the most all-encompassing, and the most overwhelming … but it doesn’t have to be. Learning the skill of Positive Presence moves self-awareness into your natural state. It leads you to a new way of thinking and being that automatically raises your emotional and behavioural intelligence. And it builds in you the cognitive and behavioural strength needed for leading authentically in uncertain and chaotic times amid the complexity and lightening-fast change of today’s corporate world.

The one thing nobody can take away from you is the way you choose to respond to the environment around you and especially to what others say and do. As you hone your skill for Positive Presence you will develop personal signals that remind you to ward off the negative and choose an appropriate attitude and response to protect your positive space where your authentic self resides.

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Do You Have a Toxic Work Environment?

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Some surveys show that as many as half of all front-line workers feel low levels of work engagement stemming in part from poor leadership. If any one person, regardless of technical ability, cannot connect and cooperate with other people, the result is a toxic work environment and no matter how good their technical expertise is, the goals and objectives of the team will not advance.

In virtually every organization there is at least one person who is universally regarded as detrimental to the mission, vision, values, and strategies of the enterprise. This is the person whom others would like to fire had they the authority to do so. No organization needs a team member like this. Remember, no organization can become what its people are not; if employees are mediocre, the organization will be mediocre. If an employee exhibits toxic behaviour, the organization will exhibit toxic behaviour. No aspect of this scenario can be good for the overall performance of any organization.

Poor behaviour will always drive performance down, individual performance and team performance, and at the end of the day, organizational performance. Without a cooperative attitude, disruptive competition and conflict reign – two conditions in which errors are highly likely, staff morale and motivation are low, performance is inconsistent and unreliable, communication and cooperation are nonexistent, and everyone has a secret agenda.

In today’s complex and chaotic work environment, strength-driving behaviours have never been more important. Unfortunately, we take it for granted that people know what appropriate workplace behaviour is, and this assumption is one of the most common errors made in today’s corporate world. If you do not have an ongoing program for behavioural competency training – chances are you do have a toxic work environment.

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Are You Exercising Your Mind?

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Meditation is actually exercise for the mind and trains the mind to be present and go beyond all thought – strengthening the muscle of the mind by placing focus on the present. Where we focus is a choice and with practice our mind becomes more adept at staying in the present by our control. As we hold our mind in the present, the mind calms and our body will follow suit. We are then able to respond to situations rather than react to them. We can communicate more effectively, with compassion and empathy as opposed to judgment or ridicule. This change occurs naturally, and with gentleness.

All emotions are part of the human experience. In meditation we learn to be in relationship with all emotions, good and bad, and to see them as energy-in-motion – allowing it to move through us and beyond us – for greater emotional and physical well-being. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about finding acceptance of where we are right in the moment and giving ourselves permission to be there.

The goal for mindfulness is to realize the lasting beneficial effects created by the plasticity of the brain – allowing it to actually change the way it makes connections. In a deadline-driven workplace, empathy is often the first thing to go, as the focus narrows from people and relationships, to task completion. The more and faster we are pushed – the more need there is to maintain a healthy mind. Using meditation we can dump the subconscious emotional burden and learn to light up the happy hormones, clearing away the clouds to experience clearer thinking, improved decision making, and a heightened awareness of self to take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively.

In closing, here are a couple of simple meditations to try:
1. Sit in your office chair and bring your attention inward to your breathing.
2. Focus your attention on your heartbeat.
3. Take a deep inhale. Hold and count one-two-three.
4. Exhale out.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 and try to keep this calm of mind with you for as long as possible.

Also try taking a walking meditation. Take a break and go for a short walk. Simply walking and breathing – staying mindful and focused on the present moment. If outside, listen to the sounds around you. Notice the shapes and smells of the trees. Clear your mind of the clutter. Be mindful of what you are feeling. Focus on the positive.

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Meditation for Workplace Wellness

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Benefits of workplace meditation are becoming increasingly clear. Participants feel less depressed and less emotionally exhausted, and above all, less stressed. We have figured out every possible way to exercise our physical body … the next frontier is our mind – to get the most out of our brains so we can handle the mega-pressures of the information era. Today, meditation is being used by a large cross section of society – from the United States Marines to large corporations. The benefit of stress reduction is slashing corporate healthcare costs, building emotional resilience, happiness and an overall more positive outlook on life.

Research shows that constant information overload sends the brain into the fight-or-flight stress response, originally designed to protect us from man-eating tigers and other threats. Studies showed that 50% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent ‘managing information’ and that constant information overload sends the brain into the fight-or-flight stress response. In a high stress level state we lose our ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.

Meditation has been found to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and decrease the size of the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with sensing threats and triggering the fight-or-flight stress response. Meditation has also been found to trigger physiological changes of relaxation, such as lower heart and respiratory rates, lower blood pressure, and lower oxygen consumption. There is an increase in activity in the left prefrontal cortex which is associated with positive emotions, thus increasing one’s ability for focus and concentration, empathy, decision making, self awareness, and for more adaptive responses to negative or stressful events.

If you are not reaping the benefits of meditation in today’s pandemic-driven, chaotic and stress-filled world, your performance as an individual, as a leader, and as an organization will undoubtedly suffer negative consequences.

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Are You Motivated to Change?

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Practicing self-awareness and identifying your behaviour strengths will help you manage your behaviour choices and help you to form effective collaborations. These are the key steps to becoming an effective leader.

Achieving the goal of effective leadership requires daily practice of managing yourself well within your behaviour strength domain. This requires the motivation to change and to acknowledge through self-awareness how your behaviour impacts others around you. Then use your behaviour strength(s) to know why it is you choose to behave the way you do. With this knowledge you now have to make a conscience choice to change those areas you discover about yourself that are hindering your effectiveness.

Leadership is not simply a buzzword but an action. Leadership is being an active participant in the management of others and organizations. Change is rarely welcomed. In fact, in most cases it will make you uncomfortable because it forces you to make a conscience effort to do something different. Change forces you out of your comfort zone and long-held standard practices and mental models.

To effectively lead others you must be a great leader and acknowledge as Jim Collins said, “good is the enemy of great.” You cannot create great organizations and become great leaders if you are unwilling to change those elements of your behaviour that you accept as ‘good enough’. Effective leadership means peak performance and it is a full time, daily pursuit. As a peak performer you are committed not only to your own success but to the success of others. You support and encourage others around you and do what you can to help them achieve their goals and succeed in the pursuit of their mission.

Once you understand your behaviour strengths and why you behave they way you do, you can then,
through self-awareness, understand how you impact others. So it is that you must be empowered with a purpose and a motivation to change. John Maynard Keyes said, “that the hardest thing is not to get people to accept new ideas; it is to get them to forget the old ones.”

If you want to become an great leader, you must change the elements of your behaviour that may be ‘good enough’ but are holding you back from great personal and professional achievement. The skill of Positive Presence leads to a new way of thinking and being that when mastered is the natural state of a highly skilled change agent.

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Mindfulness for Stress Release

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

The complexity, ambiguity and relentless pace of today’s pandemic driven world places gigantic demands on business leaders in every industry. Leaders are working incredibly hard and yet feel that they are not meeting their own expectations of excellence. They are left overburdened and disconnected from their own values. Amid these overwhelming circumstances, leaders are expected to make fast, rational decisions with a focused, clear, compassionate and creative mind.

Mindfulness training is often associated with meditation practice – but it has become much, much more than that. Mindfulness is defined as ‘paying attention in the present moment, non-judgmentally’. Mindfulness harnesses our capacity to be aware of what is going on in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts … as we maneuver in an unavoidable sea of constantly changing events which demands that we change and adapt, often at lightning speed. This demand by the environment for us to continually change and adapt can, and most often does, create stress.

Stress is a relational transaction between our self and our environment during which we perceive and appraise events as threatening — in that they are over-taxing to us in some way. Changing the way we see ourselves in relationship to these stress-triggering events can actually alter the events themselves.

We have an innate desire for stability, although life itself requires that we must be in continuous change-mode. Mindfulness is a way to train the mind, but also includes paying attention to the body and the world around us, and helps us recognize that we are not a slave to our thoughts, but rather, we can choose how we respond.

There is plenty of evidence, including from the mental health arena and the field of neuroscience, showing how mindfulness can help reduce stress. The practice of mindfulness provides a way to cope with the challenges, complexities and ambiguity of our times. Studies indicate benefits such as heightened emotional intelligence, improved decision-making and strategic-thinking abilities, a heightened ability to focus, enhanced creativity, increased engagement in work, more energized and less anxious, and fewer symptoms of stress.

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What is Your Leadership Strength?

Posted on February 9, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Have you ever wondered why you choose to behave a certain way?   To help answer this question, Tom Rath and Barry Conchie have classified leadership strengths into four domains: (1) executing (driver), (2) influencing (persuader), (3) strategic thinking (analyzer), and (4) relationship building, (stabilizer). So what does each of these domains mean? Suppose you identify with being an “analyzer”, or someone who is good at strategic thinking. People will experience your behaviour as cautious, careful, consistent, and diplomatic.

It is important to recognize that everyone has a behaviour preference that can be represented into one of these four domains.  You do however, have the ability to flex outside of your preference into other domains if you first acknowledge your own behaviour preference and the preferences of others. You determine your behaviour preference by how you choose to see the world around you.

Your strength domain increases your potential for success by bringing what you believe to be true from your inside into a congruent alignment to your daily outer world of life events. It shapes the way you function in the critical areas of performance, such as communication, visioning, processing information, thinking creatively, managing emotions, aligning of core value or beliefs, and relating to others.

Having awareness of your dominant strength as well as the other strengths in those around you is essential in leading others under times of stress, change, fatigue and chaos. In other words, if ever there was a time to have this knowledge and expertise, now is it – as we all struggle to manage and lead in a pandemic world.

Your behaviour strengths connect you to who you are, what you believe, and how you choose to behave.  As you gain awareness of your individual behaviour strengths, you can then use them for the optimal outcome in relationships and performance.

Furthermore, if you are going to become an effective leader, you must understand the power of collaboration and connection so you can create a team composed of people who have strengths in all four domains. In this blend and balance of strengths, you will be able to propel those around you and your organization to a higher level of performance.

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Learning from HeartMath

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Well over 20 years ago Doc Childre and a group of 30 researchers and entrepreneurs gathered to explore the connection between the metaphorical and physical heart, and in 1991 they formed the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) as a nonprofit research and educational organization with a core mission of facilitating a shift in health, wellbeing and consciousness. In 1998, HeartMath LLC launched to commercialize the trainings developed by the Institute. And in 2002, Quantum Intech incorporated to develop and license emWave technology.

HeartMath has been at the forefront of delivering measurable results to improve employee productivity, health and performance since the early 1990s by focusing on unique, scientifically-validated programs that are proven to help individuals manage stress in the workplace. They continue to look at how chronic stress adversely impacts human health by increasing the likelihood of developing disease and medical problems leading to soaring healthcare costs.

Through the collaboration of cardiologists, system theorists and neuroscientists, they have built on their research on the connection between the heart and the Autonomic Nervous System and created tools and effective protocols, to help people effectively manage stress and anxiety, focusing on human energy and heart-brain synchronization, as well as the body’s natural regenerative processes, and mental and emotional stability.

Relatively recent research in the neurosciences has shown there is a continuous looping and re-looping of energy both positive and negative, between our two dominant human energy fields — the heart and the brain. And it is this looping and re-looping of energy that makes each of us a unique individual. Studies show that when our energy is positive we are experiencing positive thoughts and feelings such as kindness, happiness, optimism and love….and on the flip side when thoughts and/or feelings are negative (like, anger, frustration, jealousy, and cynicism) … our energy is also negative. We can use our skill of Positive Presence to create the necessary positive energy loop.

Much of the research in this field was pioneered by the Institute of HeartMath including evidence that positive emotions create coherence within our personal heart-field and coherent wave frequencies within our torus energy field around us. Only coherent wave frequencies are able to overlap and reinforce each other, thereby gaining strength and giving strength to other coherent wave-forms. So it is that positive emotion (positive thoughts and feelings) brings with it an increased ability to ‘connect’ and ‘mesh’ with others …. an increased ability to work together, and an increased propensity for organizational synergy.

In all of today’s work environments, understanding the role positive human energy plays in the performance and wellness of your workforce, is a key element to creating and maintaining a culture for success.

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Focus On Behaviour, Not Technical Skills

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

It is behaviour and relationship skills that bring out the technical competencies and enable the job of a leader to be done well. At higher levels of leadership (e.g., chief executives), technical skills are even less important than good behaviour and relationship-building ability. The reason for that is the work of senior leaders is more strategic than operational.

Look at the number of highly capable leaders in politics, business, and non-profit sectors who have failed. The root cause has not been their lack of talent, desire, ambition, enthusiasm, passion, agility, and other qualities. What sends these otherwise successful leaders hurtling toward the ground is their poor behaviour. They become so insulated by their sense of self-worth and value that they lose sight of how they relate to others and they get separated from those who can give them honest feedback.

Behavioural attributes (including interrelations ability), commonly and incorrectly referred to as “soft skills,” are really the “hard skills” that enable the leader to become self-aware, collaborative, and connective. Employees’ low morale, refusal to engage in their work, distrust of management, lack of motivation, and poor performance are always linked to their leaders’ consistent display of negative behaviour. In today’s world it is easier to overlook someone’s technical shortcomings than poor interpersonal skills, that is why a leader’s behaviour is the most important predictor of organizational performance.

We do not live or work in isolation. Nearly everything of value we do in our lives requires us to connect and collaborate well with other people in highly effective relationships. This can be no more true for leaders who must develop these highly effective relationships to be individually successful and to lead their organizations to greatness. Research in the neurosciences is confirming the necessity for a new way of thinking and being – the kind that creates positive human energy within us and around us – the kind created using our skill of Positive Presence.

When it comes to relationships, the challenge is that we often expect more from them than we are willing to invest. You do not get the relationships you hope for, rather the relationships you are willing to work for– how people respond to you is a function of how they experience you in your behaviour. Behaviour is a choice so choose wisely!

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New Learning for Connection

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

In the developed world, our organizations are now composed primarily of knowledge workers– people who are highly educated and experts in their individual fields, and who need each other’s mind and skill in order to achieve organizational goals.  These people are too smart to accept top down dictatorship and to believe that a few at the top know what it will take for success.  There has never been a time in history for employee engagement to reach exponential levels of motivation as there is today.  With the right leadership, the knowledge work force will be able to reach successes never dreamed of.

So what will the ‘right’ leadership look like?  Unfortunately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer, but on the other hand, leadership qualities can be found and developed in everyone, at every level of the organization.  For success in today’s fast-paced ever-changing global environment, leadership will be about managing the individual flow of energy and information in a quick and efficient manner.  Information at the front lines will need to be relayed in real time to the top in order for barriers to be removed, opportunities to be grasped, and strategies to be adjusted to accommodate the environment in real time.

At the big-picture level, leaders and managers must learn to be effective conduits of information, both tangible and non-tangible alike, in an environment of safety and respect.  Successful organizations will be a continuous looping and re-looping of information, feedback and adjustment.  Organizations will have to flatten right out so that information is being transmitted quickly and efficiently.  Managers will be the eyes and ears between where the work is being done and where the strategy is evolving.  Power lines for informed decision-making will have to be free of bureaucratic static and barriers, and it will be up to managers to become experts at mitigating the bureaucracy that often weighs down efficiency.

For efficient information transfer and sharing there will need to be high levels of cooperation, coordination and collaboration among leaders of all ranks to ensure information is communicated clearly, succinctly, and consistently through all channels.  This level of communication will require highly effective relationships and a special connectivity among organizational leaders.  It will require the type of connectivity that only comes with an understanding of emotional human energy that leads to connectedness – how it works; how it evolves; and the behaviours needed to get there.

We need to look to the neurosciences and the plethora of evidence that is coming forth using advanced neuro-imaging technology within the realm of cognitive behaviour (among others).  And then we have to develop the necessary cognitive and behavioural skills in our leaders, beginning with the skill of Positive Presence.  These skills are paramount to leading with high levels of connectivity, and these skills must be continuously accounted for and supported through the overarching organizational culture.

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