Brilliant Health

by BrillianceInc | Building Teams, Developing Others, Newsletter Archives Comments | 0

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Often times, people struggle with how to best improve the overall health of their team, company, career, or personal relationships. Leaders may wonder, “Which of our broken process do I fix first?” or “Which of the 10,000 training programs do I invest in?” An individual may be stumped about how to proceed with their career development: “I know I want something more from my job but I don’t know what. Where do I start?”

There are a number of remedies and tools out there: workshops, assessments, consultants, coaches, and for some, counselors or more alternative advisors. Deciding among remedies can cause you to want to sweep the problem under the rug – yet again.

We think it is helpful to take a step back, look at the situation more holistically, and see what needs to be attended to first.

We propose diagnosing your team, your personal effectiveness, your career, your marriage – whatever you are willing to take on – and selecting appropriate treatment just as you would with one of your most important assets: your health.

You start with triage – ensuring that the critical life giving elements are handled. Then move to manage pain and symptoms, with the aim of creating long term optimal health in the process. Let’s take a look.

1) Triage
It’s very difficult to achieve incredible (or even mediocre results) when you are bleeding or barely breathing. You must first attend to whatever it is that is squeezing the life out of your team, job, or relationship. It’s not the problem, per se, but the degree of severity that lands it in this category. Look for the gushing arteries. Is your attrition rate on your team through the roof? Are clients fleeing to the competition? Did you just launch your version of New Coke? Do your kids lock themselves in your room when you get home from work?

So, how do you figure out if you have a paper cut or a life-threatening injury? In some cases you may need to pay an outside firm or coach to run an analysis, or you could try asking some simple questions of yourself and your team such as:

What is it about working here that:

  • Has you running screaming from your team meetings?
  • Has you updating your resume or searching for a career coach?
  • Has your spouse rolling his/her eyes and wearing ear plugs when you talk about your team/job?
  • Has you moving your therapist to speed dial?

If you think we’re being too silly with some of these questions, think again. Research shows that you will often have more success breaching an ugly topic if you make light of it. But don’t expect real answers unless your team has high levels of trust. If that isn’t the case try:

  • Curiosity: Ask “What do you see as the most significant, underlying reason for the challenges we face?”
  • Silence: give them time to think. Then thank the first person who speaks and say “What else?”
  • Offer your own painfully honest answer: (as long as it’s not cruel to any person on the team). You might start by naming the thing that everyone knows but no one feels safe naming.
  • Start creating a safe environment: Apologize for your past poor behavior and commit to changing. Then, stop punishing people who express negativity. Instead, thank them for their courage, publicly if possible, and ask them what else they would like to share.

If you find out you have such an injury, take steps to fix it. Now. Recall the product. Confront the toxic boss. Apologize. Hire a new therapist. And if fixing it is not in your control, involve people in finding an interim solution until the problem is fixed. The goal here is to survive…in tact.

2) Managing Pain and Symptoms
Most teams and companies find they have problems in this level at some point. The goal should be to find the remedy that will relieve the most painful symptoms. Again, involving others in robust, real conversations in an atmosphere of trust will garner the best information.

  • What makes it difficult to get things done?
  • What frustrates you the most about working here?
  • What one thing could we change to improve our effectiveness?
  • What does our competition know that we don’t?
  • If you were in charge and had complete control, what would you change?
  • What is one thing I would change that would make my job less stressful?
  • What is the situation that triggers unproductive conversation most frequently and how do we shift that?

3) Creating Optimal Health
While managing your symptoms, you can work toward optimal health. In business, this means going from good to brilliant. The answers are within the system, it just takes drawing them out with good questions, listening skills, and an environment of trust.

  • • How could we be having more fun?
  • • What’s going well? How could we make better?
  • • If you were in charge, what improvement or change would you make?
  • • How could we delight our clients?
  • • How could we delight our employees?
  • • What change could we make that would cause you to take your resume off the job boards for good?
  • • What change could we make that would have you recommending this place to your best friend?
  • • What keeps us from being as effective as we could be?
  • • What looms in the future that threatens to knock us off balance?
  • • Where do I feel most satisfied in my job and how can I do more of that?
  • • What is going well in my career and what would excite me to take on next?

Just as in life, you can work on all these levels. You can take aspirin for the pain AND eat a healthy diet. Just remember to tie the tourniquet first.

Here are some of our favorite remedies:

Conduct conversations authentically, skillfully, and with care. Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott (workshop and book) can help you figure out how.

Recognize your need to grow as a leader (yes, even you!): What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Marshall Goldsmith

Use tools for clarifying your path to health: The Grove (graphic facilitation that gives you a new way to clarify your vision, understand current conditions, and move forward productively)

Learn to optimize your strengths and flex your style-both as an individual and a team: MBTI, FIRO-B, Highlands, Strengthsfinder 2.0, Spherical Dynamics

Become a manager who evokes excellent performance and commitment in others: Coaching for Brilliance Workshop

Work with a partner to assess your situation, develop a targeted development plan, and achieve your goals: One-on-One Leadership Coaching

Here’s to your health.

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Levels of Listening

by BrillianceInc | Communication, Developing Others, Newsletter Archives, Relationship & Trust Comments | 0

If for some reason we were limited to advising clients to improve in only one area, it would be listening. It’s quite possible that there is no faster way to improve your effectiveness in all areas of life than by becoming a better listener.

It’s not that we don’t listen: we don’t do it well. And by well, we mean that we don’t listen in a way that will improve our relationships, our results, our selves. We listen to get by. And it’s no surprise. We are bombarded by constant sounds all day, every day.

Many of these sounds are self-inflicted. We awaken to a clock radio, have TVs on as background noise, listen to the news as we drive, and set up our phones and PDA’s to notify us whenever someone reaches out to us by email or text. I was recently with an 18-year old who received notification of a text message every 40- seconds for ten hours. Those of you who know teenagers know that this is not an exaggeration. Amidst all this cacophony, we have learned a coping skill: selective listening. Problems arise when we fail to turn off selective listening when it matters.

We can choose how deeply we listen. Here’s an overview of the different levels of listening and the distinctions between them.

Different ways to listen: (inspired by the authors of Co-Active Coaching)

Level 1. Surface Listening

Recall a time spent inside an airport terminal. How do you listen to the repeating message on the speaker system that tells you that baggage left unattended will be confiscated and cars left unattended will be towed? Most likely, you barely even hear it. It’s there but it doesn’t garner much of your attention. Nor should it. You have many other things that require deeper focus.

We run into trouble when we listen to our loved ones or valued associates in this manner. We hear but we don’t grasp the full meaning. Nuance is lost. How do you feel when someone listens to you at this level? Unfortunately, the people closest to us are likely to encounter us in this level often. You could also call this the post nuptial listening level.

Level 2. Spiked Attention Listening

Think about that same loudspeaker in the airport. What if you hear your name called?
At this level, we listen at a surface level until something provokes our interest. We hear more than we do at level one, but we still don’t grasp all meaning. We are self-focused. We drift.

Level 3. Curious Listening

Back in the airport, how do you listen to announcements about your flight when you are late and the voice has a strong accent in a language different from your native tongue? You anticipate; clear your mind of distracting thoughts; listen attentively. When we listen in this way to others, we strive to understand fully. We may also pay attention to subtle cues. While this is a deep listening, it’s often still self-focused. We listen for what it means to us. “How does what you’re saying reflect on me?” “How does it impact me?” “How does it prove what I already believe to be true?”

Level 4. Intuitive Listening

At this level, we employ senses beyond auditory. We listen for nuance, for meaning, for discovery. We have no agenda, nothing to prove. We are open to learning. We notice what’s not said. We detect emotion. At this level, we call on our intuition to inform us. We take cues from non-verbal sounds and movement.

Most of us are not practiced at this type of listening. At best, we operate at level three sometime in our day. In some cultures however, this kind of listening is more common. In these so-called, high-context cultures*, people adeptly attune to unspoken messages. Listening more deeply like this does take more energy if we are not used to doing it.

You don’t have to listen deeply all the time: The idea is to listen deeply when in conversation with others who would benefit from your focused attention-your colleagues associates, your partner, your child. If you want to evoke brilliance from yourself and others, you must call on a deeper listening. And that of course, will take practice.

It’s worth the effort. Here’s a list of some outcomes great listeners experience:

  • Increased trust from others
  • Greater knowledge of all aspects of projects, events, people, plans
  • Improved relationships with colleagues across departments
  • Greater efficiency through fewer miscommunications and rework
  • More engaged and motivated associates
  • Greater ability to attract and retain talent
  • Greater ability to communicate effectively with international colleagues

Good listening!

* High-context means that “most of the information is either in the physical context or initialized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message.” (Hall, 1976, p 79).

Book of the month:
Co-Active Coaching, 2nd Edition: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life. Laura Whitworth, Karen Kimsey-House, Henry Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl

Question for Reflection:
How would the world be different if enemies listened to each other at level four?

Opportunity of the Month:
Notice how you listen to those that matter most. Upgrade to the next level. Then the next. What does this create?

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Unique Brilliance

by BrillianceInc | Authenticity, Career Satisfaction, Developing Others, Newsletter Archives, Strengths Comments | 0

Ever had someone try to “help” you by trying to mold you into the image that they had in mind? How’d that work out? I’m guessing not well. Yet, we see the phenomenon over and over.

Children grow up and sign on for a career path that their parents wanted for them, only to wake up years later, unfulfilled, wondering whose life they have been living. Managers guide their employees to positions that will diversify their skills, trying to ensure that everyone can do everyone else’s job, and wonder why morale is low. Knowledge of what other team members do is helpful, but being expected to be good at everything your co-workers do is a different matter.

One place you rarely see this is in professional sports. Great coaches know that they have to win to keep their jobs and to keep the mob of fans from dragging them out of town. With so many eyes watching, the great coaches figure out who is good at what and they put them in roles that maximize their innate talent, passion, and learned ability. Can you imagine a coach saying to his star quarterback, “Since you’ve been doing such a great job throwing the ball, I’m going to give you a chance to build your skill at blocking and tackling. We’ll let a linebacker take your job as a stretch assignment.”

Queue the mob.

Gallup found that great managers have given up on trying to make everyone over. Instead, they look for each person’s kernel of brilliance and cultivate it. These managers post incredible results. When people get to shine at work, they are more engaged, more productive, more inspired, and inspirational. When people get to use their brilliance every day, they are more willing to pitch in on work that can be a chore, more willing to coach their peers, and more willing to stay on through difficult times.

No two cut diamonds are alike. Even in the same family, children’s talents and passions can be wildly divergent. If you want to inspire brilliance, start looking for the diamond wanting to shine through. Then help a person cultivate their unique brilliance. You may want to start with yourself.

Questions for Finding Brilliance:

  • When have you felt most satisfied? What skills were you using? What were you learning? What was the environment?
  • What about your job most engages you?
  • What praise has meant the most to you?
  • Assuming that all your needs were taken care of, what work would you do for little to no pay?
  • What talent or knowledge do people seek you out for?
  • What comes easily for you?

Questions for Cultivating Brilliance

  • How could you build more of ____ into your job?
  • What books, classes, or other development opportunities would help you grow in this area?
  • What support do you need from me?

Resources:

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Advice: Proceed With Caution

by BrillianceInc | Communication, Developing Others, Employee Engagement, Newsletter Archives Comments | 0

Great coaches give advice sparingly, even though they have ample amounts to give. They are like good Driver’s Ed instructors. Ever been inside a Driver’s Ed car? They resemble ordinary cars with one big exception-a functional brake pedal on the passenger’s side. The good instructor uses the pedal in emergencies only. They know that if they use it more often, they leave the student dependent on the instructor, rather than confident and fully capable of handling whatever surprises-like stop signs-the road may present.

It’s appropriate to have a passenger-side brake with beginner drivers. With experienced drivers, I think this could become grounds for assault, or at least divorce. In business, it’s appropriate to dish out ample servings of advice to beginners. And hopefully, all of us are encountering new situations all the time at work. So the trick is for managers to discern when an employee is a beginner and when he or she brings ample amounts of experience to a challenge.

Dish out advice to an experienced employee and you risk creating dependency. They can solve problems faster if they ask you. So, ask they do. And then you spend your days solving other people’s problems. You get to feel important.. and miss working on more strategic problem solving and staff development.

So, what can you offer instead of advice? You evoke brilliance when you help people see the problem from a new angle-an angle that allows for a solution that was not visible before. We call this type of reorientation Recasting. Same clay, different pot.

Here are some tools anyone can use to shake up his own or others’ views:

  • Metaphor: Managing is like being a drivers ed instructor. Use of the break is only appreciated when the employee/student is just learning.

    • >Story: “There is a story about a young student who..”

  • Quote: “You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes”. Denis Waitley
  • Song: Break the Window by Fiona Apple
  • Imagery: See side bar
  • Language: in the form of an open-ended powerful question
    • How could you remove obstacles?
    • How could you make the impossible possible?
    • Assume you are at your retirement party. What do you want to be remembered for?
    • If nothing changes a year from now, what will you feel?
  • Poetry: Two Wolves
    • A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about a tragedy. He said, ‘I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.’ The grandson asked him, ‘Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?’ The grandfather answered, ‘The one I feed.’ ~Native American Proverb

As in any creative process, sometimes you have to recast several times before you create the masterpiece. So don’t assume that one question or metaphor will break open possibility. Stay with it. Have fun in your new creative mode.

And drive safely.

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Authentic Brilliance

by BrillianceInc | Authenticity, Emotional Intelligence, Newsletter Archives, Relationship & Trust Comments | 0

In business, as in dinner parties, it’s commonly accepted that if you want to have a pleasing time, you don’t talk politics.

We’re making a departure from that sound theory.

That’s because something strange is happening in the race to the White House that deserves attention in the business world. We are actually seeing examples of positive traits that leaders everywhere can adopt.

What I find most interesting in this unprecedented race is that all of the candidates are playing themselves. That’s right. You may not like their politics, but at least you know who your choices are.

So perhaps for the first time since in politics since the beginning of the TV era, the public is seeing several authentic candidates.

Typically, candidates morph their identities depending on the state they wake up in. Iowa? Hooray for Ethanol! Florida? Hooray for subsidies to build on flood plains! Arizona? Boo to amnesty for illegal immigrants! Michigan? Boo for globalization! California? Hooray for everything!

Not so this time.

When you have a true core, people are very forgiving. People will give you the benefit of the doubt as long as they think you’re not hiding something. Forget or abandon your core, and people smell it.

In addition to authenticity, here are a few more noteworthy leadership traits on display:

  • Appropriate, non-threatening display of emotion that demonstrates your humanness. Hillary’s near tears when faced with a question that hit her in the heart, were one of the factors that may have extended her candidacy. Note, this was not a Howard Dean war-cry moment.
  • Respect people enough to tell them the truth. While Michigan auto workers may not have liked McCain’s admission that some jobs were not coming back, the statement preceded his victory in several states and showed that you could count on him to tell you that you had spinach in your teeth.
  • Admit you’re not perfect…and then focus on the future. What do you do when someone has penned two autobiographies airing all his dirty laundry and placing the blame with no one but himself as Obama has?

While there’s no guarantee the candidates won’t resort to less noble leadership behaviors as the tension mounts, it’s a sure bet that this election will inspire fewer allergic reactions than those of the past.

Brilliant.

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