Home › Leaders › Page 31

Connecting Behaviour to Performance

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Catherine Osborne

The belief that a leader’s behaviour is the key predictor to organizational performance is a radical shift in leadership thinking.

To develop a performance driven culture a key element is to begin to focus not on the technical elements and processes, but to begin to consider the impact that poor behaviour has on safety, quality and service. This shift must start with leaders at all levels. Real change will never come from an annual conference or the latest management fad. It will come from within an organization whose leaders are committed to a common purpose and have the character to inspire confidence to achieve the strategic aims of the organization. Sadly and with great regularity, we are witness to the self-destruction of leaders and their organizations who fail to grasp the fundamental connection between individual leader behaviour and organizational performance.

Closing the performance gap in health care or any other noble enterprise is a nonnegotiable imperative. In the middle of this gap between our current levels of performance and where we can realistically improve, real people, the patients, are suffering real and avoidable harm. Decades of emphasis on technical skills and technical solutions have provided some modicum of marginal improvement. The real key to improving the safety and quality of care and reducing the financial impact of a system fraught with errors and mistakes is to focus on behavioural skill development.

One way we can start improving the training and development of our leaders and simultaneously hold them accountable to strategic outcomes is rethinking the annual performance review process. In his article “It’s Time to Get Rid of Annual Performance Reviews,” Merge Gupta-Sunderji argues, “Most employees look forward to the annual performance review the way they look forward to a root canal. Feelings range from anxiety and angst to annoyance and anger. Not that performance reviews are a thrill for managers. Typically, they involve hours of preparation, and the outcome is often a leader and team member who is less engaged than before. If you add the antiquated practice of forced ranking, the result is more people who are disillusioned, disconnected and demoralized than before you started.”

If we have leaders and individuals in our organizations that are so toxic as to disrupt performance, quality, safety, and workplace values then we need effective leadership behaviour that transcends development plans and performance appraisals. Furthermore, we should be developing leaders with the coaching skills to address performance in a systematic and continuing process rather than a one-year event. Research indicates that a consistent and progressive process of meeting with team members on a regular basis with constructive feedback tied directly to performance outcomes gets more at the heart of true employee engagement and success.

For example, a behaviour based feedback tool that engages employee’s behaviours strengths would include questions such as: Do you know what behaviours you display on a daily basis? Are your habits bringing you closer to or preventing you from achieving higher levels of performance necessary to make a significant difference in the lives of other people? This process can and should occur not just one or twice a year, but as constant leader-to-leader, peer-to-peer engagement sessions. We must recognize that this type of process leads to and develops long lasting and productive workplace environments that are healthy, collaborative, and built around the mutual acceptance of trust. This also creates the opportunity to discuss leadership development and performance achievement in a constructive and positive way that will achieve sustaining results — not one that’s built on an outdated model of technical skill achievement and internal office competition.

At the heart of behaviour development is the skill of Positive Presence™ — a new and deliberate way of thinking and behaving that makes the connection between emotional energy and behaviour and is easily practiced and developed right on the job. For many, it is just a lot of common sense, but for others it is a slow and gentle process that requires the help of both team mates and leaders.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Why Leadership Efforts Fail

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Catherine Osborne

Go online, stroll through a bookstore, attend another training workshop or seminar and you will see that the topic of leadership is everywhere. We talk about it in political terms, business, sports, and tax-exempt organizations. People are captivated and confused at the same time by the concept of leadership and the essential elements that produce a high performance leader.

Though we may be in very different organizations by purpose and function, we all know when we are experiencing and working with an ineffective leader. It is something we feel. It is also something we experience in diminished outcomes and performance. We often learn from these experiences what we do not want to imitate in the technical and behavioural skill lapses of these ineffective leaders. Conversely, we often find it difficult to identify and develop traits of an effective leader, programmatically, that does not seem to be mechanical or a “one-size-fits-all” approach that ignores the unique qualities of individual human beings. Consequently, there are a number of factors that contribute to the failure of leadership development.

Keep in mind that leadership development and aligning leaders toward performance outcomes and cultural improvement is a key strategic priority for senior leadership of virtually any organization.

We have discovered in our research, three critical factors we can identify as the root cause of stalled or failing leadership development programs in most organizations. First is limited participation by senior leadership in the training. Second is the failure to customize the training and development to the needs of the individual leader and the strategic objectives of the organization. Third, is the lack of accountability for changing behaviour following the training that measures improvement in key outcome indicators. The limited participation of senior leaders signals a lack of commitment to the other key leaders of an organization. As one common saying explains, “The difference between participation and commitment is like an eggs and ham breakfast: The chicken participated, but the pig was committed.

If you are a senior leader, you have to ask yourself, how committed are you to real change in your organization and what am I doing to create that change? Senior leaders create strategic vision and objectives for the organization. Leadership development is most effective when the efforts of its leaders are connected to those strategic objectives that indicate the business priorities of the organization. Active participation of senior leadership in development programs gives them the best opportunity to align the development of their leaders to achieving those strategic outcomes. Maintaining your strategic focus as a senior leader and assessing the technical and behaviour skill sets of your organizational leaders is best accomplished by your active participation in the development efforts as well.

Another reason that leadership development efforts fail is the cynicism of senior leaders. This cynicism is often fostered by the false belief that such training efforts will yield minimal benefits but require maximum resources. This mind-set is potentially disastrous, and it communicates to talented employees that the organization is not concerned about their growth and development. An important paradox to remember is that people do not quit their jobs; they quit their leaders. Performance engagement, the willingness of people to bring their talent and brains to work to further the interests of their organizations, is predicated on a culture that invests in people, and leadership that supports that investment. When an organization fails to develop its leaders, or worse, when an organization develops leaders and loses them to another organization, the impact on organizational performance is staggering.

We now have the science to prove that the motivation and passion that we associate with employee engagement, and the focus and clarity that we associate with optimum productivity, and the emotional intelligence that we associate with influential leadership – they only occur within positive emotional energy. We also know that the tangible indicator of emotional energy is behaviour. The skill of Positive Presence is an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to emotional energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills indicative of an energized work force.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Inspiring Others to Embrace Change

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Catherine Osborne

What makes people, who possess knowledge about what they need to do to actually improve their performance, alter and change their behaviour? The answer is volition- a purposeful, intentional choice.

People choose to change their behaviour when they have a compelling interest to do so. Sometimes the reason for such a decision boils down to dissatisfaction or unhappiness with the status quo; the consequences of not changing are too hurtful or unpalatable. Richard Beckhard and Rubin Harris offer this classic equation regarding change resistance:
dissatisfaction x desirability x practicality > resistance to change

Dissatisfaction is an emotional reaction that is so negative it prevents a person from continuing routine or usual functioning. Although it is a negative experience, dissatisfaction provides a motivation to change. Desirability is the emotional reward for making a change. It is the “what is in it for me” driver.
Practicality is the realistic, attainable, and emotional acceptance of the change. It is willingness and trust to believe in a doable and practical alternative to maintaining the status quo.

Keep in mind that when it comes to behaviour and the brain, we are talking biology not psychology. f-MRI studies show beliefs are generated by complex recurrent firing of patterns of neurons accompanied by subtle but very specific changes in hormones and neurotransmitters. This brain activity is developed by experience and linked to the feelings that experience engenders. In other words, our brains are hardwired by experience and feelings about dissatisfaction, desirability, and practicality. The stronger the positive or negative feeling and the more frequent the experience, the more we become hardwired to behave the way we do. Remember the neuroscience adage – brain cells that fire together, wire together. To change behaviour you must first use experience to change beliefs. A person must be convinced that the change will improve performance, outcomes, and workplace satisfaction.

Your outward circumstances are always perfectly aligned with your inner thinking. You are the cause of your circumstances. Consequently we cannot change our circumstances without first changing our thoughts. Do not find yourself cursing your outward circumstances all the while you are feeding their cause. Transformational change is directly linked to the cause and effect relationship of our thinking.

Nothing changes until our thinking changes. You can behave your way into better thinking only if you are willing to trust the new behaviour. For most people, change works in the other direction – thinking about, and the emotion that comes from dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the desire for something better, drive me to try something new in behaviour. Change your thinking, you change behaviour. Change behaviour and you change the outcome.

Say No to the Status Quo
Influential leaders are highly dissatisfied with ‘status quo’. They are unwilling to allow preventable pain and suffering to continue needlessly. They are unwilling to waste precious resources and to settle for second-rate productivity and financial performance. Volition enables dissatisfied leaders to make a choice to bring back emotional meaning and purpose to their work. In addition, volition increases the desirability factor in the change equation. People will likely voluntarily change their behaviour if they are told the “why” (the conviction) before they are taught the “what” (convincing) and the “how” (compelling). This concept has existed in neuroscience and in clinical psychology for a long time. Simon Sinek has been able, most recently, to talk about “begin with why” in a way that is resonating throughout multiple industries and leadership boardrooms.

Suffice it to say, all great innovation, really big changes, are inspired by the concept of “why” – the purpose, the cause, and the belief in what many peak performers refer to as the ‘urgency imperative’. If you inspire me by raising my level of dissatisfaction with the status quo, raising my level of desire by demonstrating the benefits, and showing me that what you are asking me to do is practical, doable and achievable, then you increase the likelihood of me embracing the change. To change behaviour you must first use experience to change your thinking of previously held beliefs. Experience generates knowledge and emotion that inform future experiences. The more positive the feelings and the more direct the linkage to experience, the more likely thinking and beliefs are to change. When thinking and beliefs change (dissatisfaction, desirability, practicality) so do behaviours.

When you are ready to change, start with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the thought and behaviour skills needed for influential leadership.

One of the key characteristics of influential leaders is their ability to stimulate volition in themselves and among their followers. They do this by creating a sense of urgency, living a life with purpose, and pursuing excellence. When we choose to take this step in our leadership behaviour, we will see profound impact on our resulting outcomes, goals, and objectives. As research indicates, actively motivated and engaged team members work harder, have less instances of loss, and reduced errors, mistakes, tardiness, and sick leave. This occurs because the connection forged through behaviour change impacts those who work with us to pursue excellence and focus less on the conviction of just doing their jobs. As Simon Sinek (Start with Why) suggests, “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

If you believe that change is hard, wait until you are experiencing the painful effect of not changing. Life experience provides little mercy to those who are unwilling to change. So here is the question to ponder: do the brains of your people light up in the high performance areas of their brains when you walk into the room or when you walk out?

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Leadership Interactions Are Positive or Negative

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

The greatest of all leaders understand that methods, tools, technologies, protocols, and systems do not achieve results. People do. Therefore, it is people not processes, with whom organizational leaders must form a long-lasting, positive, emotional connection. This connection actually is a physical connection in people’s brains and is what ultimately determines the success or failure of the leader specifically and the organization as a whole. People do not connect and engage in their work at high levels of performance unless they are first connected and engaged with their leader. So here is a question to ponder: do the brains of your people light up in the high performance areas of their brains when you walk into the room or when you walk out?

People connect to their leaders before they connect to the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Staff members who feel a positive connection with their leaders are engaged, cooperative, collaborative, participative, accountable, and passionate about their work, and supportive of change. They are motivated to behave according to established expectations and to perform to the best of their knowledge, skill and ability. An organization with such a workforce can dominate any market or industry with consistent, high-quality clinical, financial and operational outcomes.

The principle of connection validates and puts into practice the concepts of self-awareness and collaboration. Selfawareness enables leaders to initiate connections with their team members, while trust and accountability – the imperative of collaboration – allow leaders to sustain these connections. In this way, connection is a strategy that influential leaders use to demonstrate they care for and understand the needs of their people. A deep connection between the leader and team members raises everyone’s level of energy, engagement, motivation and performance. Neurons (brain cells) that fire together, wire together, as the neuroscience data demonstrates. Hence, there is a neurochemical performance cocktail leaders can create in the brains of their people that drives performance based on the connection that leaders create with their team members.

Are Your Connections Positive or Negative?
Relationships, by their nature, require constant and consistent tending. The quality of care you put into these relationships translates into either a negative or a positive experience. That is, the other person perceives every one of your interpersonal exchanges and interactions as good or bad, supportive or unsupportive, trusting or untrusting, positive or negative, safe or unsafe, and so on. If you behave poorly during an interpersonal exchange, that experience is considered negative and the other person’s brain registers that encounter in experiential emotional memory (EEM); conversely, if you conduct yourself well, that experience is counted as positive.

This idea is similar to the emotional and trust bank accounts (discussed previously), in that connectivity has a cumulative effect in deposits and withdrawals. (See the Speed of Trust, by Stephen M.R. Covey for a more elaborate distinction on this concept.) The more these interactions are seen as negative, the less likely you are to develop connections. If you want to increase the positive experiences and thus enhance your connections, you must improve your individual leader behaviour. When you are ready to improve, start with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining positive, effective thought and behaviour habits.

In this context, leaders are self-aware and serve as role models of responsible, professional behaviour. Team members, in turn, become highly collaborative in a responsive behaviour based on the how the brain processes experience relative to trust, compassion, safety, and hope. Consequently, team members understand what the organization is trying to achieve and how their behaviour and performance contribute to furthering the interests of the organization. Trust and accountability are not just expected; they become a cultural norm leading to higher performance. In a word, this connection creates the elements that foster engagement. Do not wait for performance issues to appear to discover the truth of these neuroscience principles. You mess with the brains of your people at your own performance peril!

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

A Culture Built For Performance

Posted on December 10, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

In today’s professional world, people are craving effective leadership. What maybe
misattributed as generational gaps is that everywhere, middle level managers and their team members are overburdened and uninspired by individuals holding titled positions of leadership providing neither effective leadership nor effective management. The issue is not change resistance. Peter Senge said it well, “People do not resist change. They resist being changed.” Knowledge based workers desire true leadership that capitalizes on collaboration, communication and connection to accomplish their work related goals and objectives.

One of the strongest ways an influential leader can connect with others is by practicing the principle of followership. Followership is a leader’s willingness to listen to those for whom they are responsible. “Listening to me” is the highest rated attribute for an effective leader by direct reports. Effective listening creates a connection between the leader and the legitimate needs, wants, and desires of team members. By paying attention to members of the team, through active listening, a leader gains insight and information to the factors that drive performance. Peter Drucker said, “Everybody writes books about leadership. Somebody ought to write a book about followership, because for every leader there are a thousand followers.” Although followership is an age-old concept and several books have been written about it, the concept is still a novelty to many in titled positions of authority.

People do not quit their jobs. They quit their leader – the boss. Ineffective leaders breed ineffective followers and performance and productivity suffer as a result. With a positive, emotional connection with your people you send a clear message that you are interested and invested in what your people experience on a daily basis. People in general do not follow just anyone or follow out of the goodness of their heart. They need good reasons—a motivation – to follow. You are responsible for giving them those reasons by understanding what they want and need to fulfill their work requirements and contribute to a mutual and beneficial meaningful purpose in their work. During the downturn in the so-called bubble, many leaders have acquired what the professional literature is calling learned helplessness. Everything is negative, we have a “new normal” and the positive and optimistic qualities of leadership seem to be caught in this self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity and mediocrity. As leaders infect this mindset into their teams, productivity and other performance factors wane. The team members get caught in a brain-funk – simply do whatever the leader says to keep their jobs and stay out of trouble with the boss.

The reality is that inwardly, people still want to make a difference at work. They want leaders who will give them control and emancipate them to do their jobs and solve problems at their level. For some of you this may seem like a radical idea –giving control away – and a deviation from the historical “top-down” driven approach to leadership. However, if you want to connect, if you desire to become an influential leader, you have to begin to change from the outdated and ineffective practices of the past that limit your leadership capacity. As leaders we should be asking ourselves daily, is my behaviour drawing people towards me or away from me? Understanding the elements of what endears our team members to us is essential to understanding the great impact that connection has in driving performance in the workplace.

The art of connection begins with the skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy through a systematic, programmatic methodology equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the mindset and behaviour skills needed for strong and lasting connections.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

People Are the Heart of Performance

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

It has been said many times in a variety of ways and deserves repeating here: people never connect to the organization’s mission and vision until they first connect with their leader. Influential leaders are leaders (with or without a formal title or role) who possess the mind and behaviour habits that create positive and energized emotions within themselves and around them. Influential leaders demonstrate four vital strengths that ensure their success: the drive to achieve results, the ability to take initiative and accept personal responsibility, cultivating collaboration and team building, and finally, the ability to connect with people continually. Organizations do not do things, people do. People do things better when they are connected emotionally to the mission and vision of the organization and to its leadership.

Then these people come to work with high degree of energy to invest themselves in fulfilling the primary performance objectives of the organization – in a word, they are engaged.

Take note that of these four vital strengths, none of them is technical in nature. They are all behaviour oriented performance strengths. That means any person can learn them, apply them, continually adjust them, and ultimately succeed with them. “Creating and maintaining an effective culture of commitment and engagement takes effort from leaders who work closely with employees, and that’s too often being neglected. In The Conference Board’s study, 51 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with their boss. That’s down from 55 percent in 2008 and around 60 percent two decades ago.” If you do not think that leader behaviour is the most important predictor to organizational performance you better start thinking again. Decades of research by Gallup suggest that highly effective leaders connect with their teams on several levels. By creating highly effective relationships with their staff, they promote a healthy and positive work atmosphere in which people feel trust, compassion, safety, and hope.

Teamwork Drives Organizational Performance
Influential leaders know how to create and sustain highly functional teams. Team building is the product of understanding human behaviour not technical skill. Influential leaders focus on behaviour skill competencies that allow technical skills to blend into a high level of workplace performance. This workplace performance translates into safety, quality, and service outcomes. Nonetheless, a national poll of workers in the United States by The Conference Board
found that 45 percent reported being satisfied with their work while the remaining number admitted to withholding discretionary performance effort. This is the lowest level of work satisfaction reported in twenty years. Translated this means the current work force does as little work as possible to avoid losing their jobs – they are disengaged.

Substandard performance in organizations is not a product of deficient technical skills but deficient behavioural skills. The organization that can, through influential leadership, create a collaborative culture will become the industry model for achieving performance excellence. Learning the skill of Positive Presence will, by its very nature, create a culture of accountability and collaboration – a huge bonus and necessity in today’s global work environment. Essential to creating a collaborative culture is the mutual exchange of feedback on performance through the use of feedback tools. Conduct surveys if you are compelled to do so but to be effective and cultivate a culture of engagement, you must be willing to act on the information you receive. The proof of your leadership credibility is in the proverbial pudding as they say.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

As Leaders We Get What We Create or Allow

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Sigmund Freud, so the story goes, went to his grave perplexed by the question “What do women want?” I wonder if it ever occurred to Freud to simply ask a woman. In business, puzzled leaders do ask their employees what they want in forms of employee satisfaction and engagement surveys. However, most organizational leaders do little with the answers they get from these employee surveys.

Employee attitude, satisfaction, and engagement surveys are indeed useful tools, and the intent behind their administration is admirable, but many of these surveys reveal little useful information to help increase engagement and drive performance in the organization. Part of the problem is technical. The questions are not suitable for their purpose or are not clearly worded. Often the survey tool itself is unwieldy to use, the participation rate is too low, or the answers cannot be compared to or measured against past results. The other part of the problem is behavioural.

Even when the survey instrument is effective and the results are fully informative, many leaders do not develop and implement changes or respond to specific comments provided by organizational members. Too often, some leaders give a token acknowledgement of people’s participation, but overall their attitude conveyed to many team members is “Be thankful you have a job.”

Many leaders do not take seriously the workplace barriers and emotional burdens their workplace cultures create. They fail to actively listen to and learn from their people’s concerns. Their survey efforts become a way to appease employees or to follow industry standards, not to genuinely change the disruptive working conditions or improve the quality of life for their people. Engagement is the level of personal investment each person brings to the workplace predicated on two factors: a positive and supportive work culture and a positive and supportive relationship with their leader. To any degree that these two factors are sub-optimized in the experience and perspective of the individual, engagement declines and a performance deficit ensues. Here is the simple truth: Employees can tell the difference between authentic leaders and those who are simply trying to fake it to make it. This distinction is apparent in the way people behave and interact with others, and no amount of regular surveys can convince employees that their leaders care enough about them to pay attention to their problems.

Far too often, employees receive attention only when their performance or behaviour causes a problem – a symptom indicative of a disengaged team member. The leader then comes to deliver a reprimand or discipline. This kind of attention is unwelcome and unpleasant to both parties and it conditions employees to think that only time they have contact with the boss or with management is when something goes wrong. Paying attention should entail much more than this narrow circumstance. It should be done when everything is going great to reinforce positive behaviours and performance as well.

How can leaders pay closer attention to team member’s behaviour so they build a more positive connection with them? You may begin with the following strategies:
• Hold listening sessions in which small groups of employees or managers (or both) meet with you to discuss their ideas and concerns. The goal is to receive information, not to defend your position or introduce changes.

• Observe, watch, or shadow employees. The goal is to learn about and witness the daily challenges, not to critique or micromanage the work.

• Ensure that existing policies and standards reflect existing practice and realities. The goal is to eliminate outdated and ineffective approaches, not to create additional processes.

• Be visible on every unit and attend employee events. The goal is to show that that you are accessible and approachable, not to assert your importance in the organization.

Your significance as a leader (maximizing engagement and driving performance) is inextricably linked to your ability to connect with people. You can connect with followers in a number of ways, but all approaches must be characterized by trust, meaning, and caring. Experiences or interactions that are more focused on tasks than on people will be perceived negatively. Negative experiences for team members accumulate and ultimately erode your connection and your leadership effectiveness. Positive experiences, on the other hand, increase your influence and enable you to sustain the connection.

Influential leaders are highly practiced with the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and it places them in a position to model positive behaviour and create positive experiences in their relationships. Positive experiences and emotional connections with people are what make you a highly effective influential leader.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Taking Advantage of Conflict and Confrontation

Posted on November 12, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

The presence of highly developed positive neuronal connections among leaders and team members does not mean the absence of conflict and confrontation. On the contrary, a culture that embraces collaboration and connection welcomes constructive conflict and confrontation. The operative word here is constructive, as this kind of conflict or confrontation is purposeful and helps the team in several ways, such as building commitment, talking candidly about challenges, revealing points of behavioural and performance weakness, and examining solutions and new approaches. Constructive confrontation and conflict reveal authenticity – there is no “fake it to make it” in relationships and trust can grow significantly as a result. Even so, this constructive type of conflict and confrontation makes the best of us anxious, and we avoid engaging these situations for various reasons, that include the following:

1. Conflict and confrontation force us to be accountable. The core of a conflict or confrontation within a team is the question: “Are you doing what you promised to do?” This “promise keeping” question is intended to keep the team members honest so that they can maintain focus, take personal responsibility, manage behaviour, and achieve their goal. The problems with this question are that (1) no one likes to ask it, and (2) no one likes to be asked it; the question can make people feel judged and pressured in the absence of trust and authenticity.

2. Conflict and confrontation give us honest feedback. We are more emboldened during a conflict or a confrontation. Thus, we are not hesitant to speak our mind about the person with whom we are in conflict or about the situation over which we have a problem. This feedback can reveal to us how other people experience us through our behaviour and how that experience influences their perception of us. As positive and constructive this behaviour experience can be, these personal revelations can make us feel uncomfortable and we can choose to avoid them.

All great relationships require constructive conflict and confrontation to grow and thrive. Influential leaders orchestrate the culture in which people can be energized, engaged, and fully aware of their meaningful contributions to the enterprise. Much of the personal and organizational benefits of such a culture can be negated if we avoid constructive conflict and confrontation. Remember this – positive conflict avoidance is negative conflict guaranteed. If you do not want to endure the toxic aspects of negative conflict then you must have the courage to engage in positive confrontation and constructive conflict. Doing so reflects a truly enlightened leader and is evident in all high performing teams.

The ability to overcome this fear can be achieved taking the following steps:
1. Reconnect with the purpose of the organization. The stated purpose of the organization, the “why” factor, is to be of service to a great number of people, not to forward one group’s interests. When we avoid strategies (like constructive conflict and confrontation) that enable the purpose of an organization to be fulfilled, we invite not only disruptions but also harm. For example, the collision of two 747 airplanes at the airport in the Canary Islands, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and countless fatal medical errors, all occurred because people who knew something was wrong did not speak up appropriately and persistently. When we reconnect with the primary meaning and purpose of our work, we can gain clarity, courage, conviction, and commitment. These ideals then drive us to pursue constructive conflict and confrontation, which help us make better decisions.

2. View conflict and confrontation as positive rather than negative. The key is to be intentional and deliberate. Generally, people’s mental model about conflict is set to “fight or flight” – that is, we run from it if we cannot fight it. And when we stay to fight, we often (if not always) lose, so we choose not to be bothered at all. This mind-set prevents us from considering a third option: See conflict and confrontation as allies, not as enemies. When our mind regards conflict and confrontation as helpful, we change our emotional reaction and their emotional impact on us.

3. Get out of the way and let constructive conflict and confrontation do their job. According to Patrick Lencioni, the leader should enable their people to work out their own problems: “It is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their people engage in confrontation, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can get sometimes.” Kerry Patterson and colleagues suggest in their book Crucial Confrontations that constructive confrontation is essential to organizational relationships, growth, and prosperity, particularly when it involves people who are at different levels: “We really perked up when the person was about to confront a leader who was more powerful – say a supervisor going head to head with a vice-president. And if the person had a reputation for being highly aggressive or even abusive, we couldn’t wait to see what happened.”

Learning the skill of Positive Presence and practicing the skill of Positive Presence will equip you with the necessary behaviour and thought habits to ensure you can successfully navigate even the most difficult conflict and confrontation.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Why We Behave the Way We Do

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

A fundamental principle, what one might call a natural law, is that people choose to act and behave based on what they believe to be true about how they see the world around them. Neuroscience research substantiates this claim. The human brain functions in a pattern recognition system. Patterning is phenomenally strong and we create a “confirmation bias” to accept outside inferences and influences that match the patterns we have created for how we choose to see the world in which we live. As a result, your brain works very hard to defend your current habits, even toxic and destructive ones.

Behind our thoughts are our assumptions, the source for the way we think and act. We have acquired these assumptions throughout our lifetime, and as we collect them and file them away, we rarely bring them back to the surface level of our consciousness. This is fundamentally why leaders can have little, direct effect on the performance of their team members. Leaders must influence positive neuronal connections with the brains of their people so accountability systems that include self-awareness, self-management, and behaviour-based expectations of individual performance can drive achievement of organizational objectives and results.

Imposing outward controls to change individual behaviour provides only a short-term “quick fix” that is not linked to how the brains of people actually function. Once the force of the external constraint, whether negative consequence or positive incentive, loses its effectiveness, individuals will revert to behaviour driven by the assumptions of the internal drivers, mental models, focus frames, cognitive, confirmation biases and the hard-wiring of pre-existing neuronal pathways. Consequently, to be truly effective in our responsibility to those we lead, we must:
• clearly establish the standards and desired results we expect in behaviour;
• identify clearly for struggling employees why their behaviour does not meet those standards and expectations;
• hold these employees accountable and get them to acknowledge their need to change; and
• if they fail to change, remove them from the organization.

This is the most challenging aspect of the coaching and counseling process. To adequately acknowledge the need to change my behaviour, I must be compelled to search for, examine and question those unconscious assumptions I have buried deep in the recesses of my mind. I must challenge the prevailing patterns I have acquired and formed over time and life experiences and replace them with more positive, effective and productive neuronal connections also referred to as “habit loop” patterns. This neuroscience truth about how the human brain functions explains why so much coaching and counseling is ineffective in bringing about internal and lasting change to employees with performance and behaviour problems.

At this stage of the process, most employees will say whatever they think is necessary to get out of the counseling session and do whatever is necessary to keep their jobs. They modify their behaviour to your expectation until doing so becomes too much of a burden. This stress is caused when their modified, external behaviour is not in alignment with their internal understanding of how they choose to act and how they choose to see the world around them. Once that burden becomes too hard to bear, they revert back to following their internal drivers (old patterns) and their toxic behaviour and poor performance returns to the workplace. This cycle of inner dissonance is also a primary cause of performance burnout manifested with the failure to achieve the primary motivational drivers of
the person.

When this pattern emerges with an employee, the only question remaining is how long you will continue to invest time in someone who is disruptive to your work place culture. Firing often isn’t necessary: Our practical work experience suggests that when struggling employees get the sense that you are serious about accountability, they will exercise their freedom of choice and decide they do not want to work for an organization where they are held accountable for their behaviour. The other alternative is you discover highly talented people who are underperforming because the current state of their brain is in self-preservation mode related to undisclosed fear. These people can recover higher brain function leading to higher levels of performance with adequate coaching and become a valued asset to your organization.

Not Making the Choice to Change
Change – whether personal or organizational – is not easy. It is a journey that takes many years and involves many people, but as the Chinese proverb states, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.”

Despite the clear and compelling reasons demonstrated and validated in research, behaviour change is still a distinct challenge for many leaders. It is not a decision to which they make a commitment immediately. In fact, some leaders do not even see the need for behaviour change. They are convinced that other people are the problem, as if these leaders can manage (let alone lead) without other people.

The truth is that none of us, regardless of how high performing and high achieving we are currently, is immune to poor behaviour and poorer judgment. It is easy to give in to toxic behaviours because we are inundated by them every day, but it is hard to erase their effects on our reputation and on the neuronal connections we have with others that either creates an environment of commitment and engagement or detracts from it.

Once you make the choice to change your behaviour, do not get discouraged. Use as many tools as
possible to help you, and conduct a self-examination before, during, and after your transformation. Deliberately develop your skill of Positive Presence, an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to human energy and easily learned through a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills needed for influential leadership.

The good news is that you are most likely already practicing many of the approaches discussed here. Now all you need to do is hone your approach every day to build even stronger connections. This is not rocket science but it is brain science and that is worth thinking about today.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized