Lead Yourself: The Choice Which Transforms

The subject of Happiness and work has never been as prominent as it is now.  The United Nations has marked the importance of Happiness by declaring an International Day of Happiness which will happen every March 20th.  The first one was this year.   Becoming happy actually is a practical process, one which great leaders not only harness for themselves, but love to share with their employees.  The following describes how I came about this discovery and put it into practice

Yesterday, I had some news which made me want to cry with frustration.  This problem had come up a couple of times before, and I had, with much annoyance, sorted it out, and here it was again.   I won’t bore you with the problem because problems are two a penny, and the real issue is what I did about it.

I had always thought of myself as “A cup half full” person until about 15 years ago.  I had an ability to identify and solve problems, and therefore make (what I thought) was a positive contribution to whichever world or organisation I was impacting upon at the time. 

It was in a session with a coach I had hired to help me make a particular transition in my life who brought that self-concept sharply into question.  We had been talking about situation in my life where I was explaining what was wrong and how I thought I had done all I could to make changes.   When she looked me straight in the eye and said “You have a slightly negative outlook on the world don’t you think?”

The silence must have only lasted about 30 seconds but it felt like about an hour while I contemplated with horror what she had just said.  In one fell swoop she uncovered one of the biggest blind spots in my life. 

In the moments that followed, I didn’t even try to deny it, the only words I could muster were “Do you really think so?”  And she nodded.  I felt like I had been punched.  The horror I think was more acute, because I actually woke up in that moment and realised it was true. 

The actual pattern of my thinking and my self-concept had been mismatched for the majority of my working life up until that point and I’d had no idea until that moment.  It was a defining moment for me because it actually made me look within, and thus the journey to uncover the largely unconscious and negative thoughts and beliefs in my mind began. 

For the next few years I worked at becoming conscious of my beliefs and thought patterns and it was amazing how judgemental I had been, not only of myself but others.  During the journey, I uncovered many patterns I had acquired.

For me ingrained beliefs and patterns of thinking are like well learned habits, which like tying shoelaces or riding a bike, you have learned so well they’ve become unconscious.  When you try to go back to identify the sequence of the beliefs and thoughts it takes some effort to uncover them, and then some real practice to change the way you’ve habitually become used to believing and thinking.

The journey has been painful and liberating and in the end totally empowering.  I would love to say that I no longer participate in negative thinking but it’s a lifetime’s work I think for me.  I now have strategies in place which can almost instantaneously change my thinking for the better, and some of my limiting beliefs at the same time.

The barometer which measures my progress is my feelings.  When I am feeling positive and peaceful emotions, I know my thinking is aligned with who I really am at my core. Gary Zukav  and Linda Francis in their brilliant book “The Heart of the Soul” puts forward the idea that your emotions are a result of your intentions, unconscious or not.

So when I started feeling anxious and fearful as a result of the problem.  I realised that my intention in that moment was flawed.  I was about to let my beliefs ideas and thoughts turn towards a victim mentality.  “Why did this happen to me again?, it must be karma”   Helplessness, “What if I can’t solve it?” When you see this pattern in black and white, it seems quite silly.  But much of our suffering in life is because of the habitual default to our mostly unconscious negative fears, beliefs and thoughts about us. 

You may well have heard the quote “Pain is inevitable, Suffering is optional,” By the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.  If you put this with the quote by the Greek playwright, Aeschylus, “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” In those two quotes you have the single choice, which can, if practised habitually, transform your life.

It is making the choice to be happy, no matter what.

So this is what I did about the problem yesterday.

1. When I began to feel anxious and worried, I stopped thinking about the problem and let my feelings come up.  It took a few moments for the feelings to pass through.
2. I contemplated for a few minutes, and then decided to look at the problem through a different lens.  I realised I had solved the problem twice before and I could very well do it again.  The fact I had this problem again, didn’t make me a bad person. In fact, the problem was a real gift because it allowed me to release some of the unconscious worry and further reinforce liberating beliefs, ideas and thoughts which I knew to be true.
3. Despite the problem, I decided to be happy, and I began to think about and feel grateful for the good things and people in my life.  I thought about how blessed I was because I could actually choose to think empowering, and peaceful thoughts, which then translated into positive feelings.

I have this now down to a fine art.  The whole process took about 5 minutes in all.  All those years ago, it could have taken me 3 days to feel positive again after encountering such a problem.  Progress indeed.

If you’d like to read more about some of my methods I have learned over the years, sign up for my weekly blog and download your free e-book:  The 6 Secrets of Great Emotional Intelligence”

Christina has managed people for twenty seven years and led hugely successful teams. She has worked with people at all levels in various organisations to help them achieve their potential, and she has been actively involved in the learning and development field in a number of different roles.

People Discovery is a Leadership Development coaching consultancy,  based in North East England, working globally.

By Christina Lattimer

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What Enlightened Leaders Practice For Success

Leaders are faced with a myriad of challenges, both from juggling many projects and dealing with the many different personality traits of their people.  In order to be open and alert to devising winning solutions to problems and blockages, there is one enduring practice which sorts out the great from the good.  This week’s article looks at this practice and how leaders apply it in the workplace. 

There is no one formula to being a successful leader.  Many would argue that great leadership is situational, and what are seen as great leadership traits for one situation, may not be so great for another.  This is very true for example, where you may have an immature team which isn’t quite yet developed, a leader may in the initial stages need to be much more directional than they perhaps would otherwise be.  The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory is quite clear on the stages involved in leading teams with different maturity levels.

Often leadership is classed as being significant, when the leadership style is values based.  The leader demonstrates to employees and customers, just who they are dealing with.  While I think many would agree that openness, honesty, humility, inclusivity for example may be universal values; they are not always actually at the top of everyone’s list.    So a commercially savvy entrepreneur who cuts corners and makes hard decisions easily, to get where they need to be, can be applauded by some and condemned by others.

The crucial practice all leaders can,  and should be good at though,  is self-awareness.  It is one thing making a decision to axe the jobs of 100 people, and having an attitude of “well that’s just business”.  It is miles away from the leader who agonises over the need to make such a decision, conscious and aware of the impact it is going to have on the livelihood of all of those people.

That’s not to say that a self-aware leader doesn’t make those decisions, but they do so with care, kindness and understanding, as well as firmly.  They will have no doubt that such a decision is a last but necessary  resort.  They also support, listen and respect the fears, anxieties and issues of the people who are affected.

We all have our blind spots, I would challenge anyone who believes they haven’t.  Although making the decision to lead a life of awareness can be a challenging one, it is also can be extremely revealing and rewarding.

In my experience, leaders who are willing to continually learn and develop their own self-awareness may not be perfect, or paragons of virtue.  What they do though is different from leaders who don’t practice self awareness, in that they learn from their mistakes, and then do something differently next time.  They take time out to evaluate how they are doing, and how they impact others.  Most importantly they are able to observe themselves objectively in order to self-appraise.

In the process of leading a team or an organisation, they willingly:

• Take feedback from their people and find out what is going wrong as well as what is going right.
• Are prepared to learn from others and they admire qualities about other people who can teach them something.
• Question their own mind sets, and are always open to learn how to be more authentically positive and to achieve great outcomes for themselves and others.
• Understand their own power to affect the intentions, mind-sets and beliefs of others and they use that power wisely and with integrity.
• Understand that leading a team is not a single-minded activity, but one where they must be open to understanding others, so as to get them on-board and engaged in what they are trying to achieve.
• Work out exactly who they want to be working with them and for them.  They have a good insight into themselves and how they tick and therefore have the same understanding of others
• Commit to continuous development of their business and people.  They understand that life is a learning experience, and it’s not just about skills and knowledge, but also about self- understanding.  Not just for themselves, but for others too.

In my latest free EBook “The Magic of Seven” you can discover the 7 x 7 Ways, Great Leaders Create Great teams.  For more information about this and Leadership Development, visit our website www.peoplediscovery.co.uk

Christina has managed people for twenty seven years and led hugely successful teams. She has worked with people at all levels in various organisations to help them achieve their potential, and she has been actively involved in the learning and development field in a number of different roles.

A Measured Return On Your Learning Investment

One of the biggest wasted opportunities for both individuals and organisations is when benefits of learning and development aren't realised.  Learning programmes are usually bought in to correct or change something and there is a perceived skill, knowledge, behaviour or competence gap.  More often or not, the focus is quite rightly on tuning the learning intervention to equip oneself or the team or organisation with the missing attribute.   However, even when the most brilliant programme has been put together there is often a gap between the learning and the realisation of benefits.  The 7 principles outlined below, I believe bridge that gap.

There are many evaluation models and cost/benefit frameworks which attempt to determine the “worth” of learning and development in the workplace.  Depending on the type of learning required, some models and frameworks are easier to apply than others.  Sometimes even when applied, the expected outcomes and improvements have either not materialised or they have taken far longer than expected.

Even when the learning programme is excellent, it doesn’t always deliver results

A number of years ago, I worked with an organisation who had invested a great deal of employee time and financial resource into a learning and development programme, with frustratingly little result.  A professional business consultancy had evaluated before and after, calculated a ROI which was a persuasive driver to buy in the proposed programme, but 18 months later, the expected benefits had simply not accrued.

The MD was totally frustrated; as the learning programme was polished, expert and inspirational.  Employees were enthused, and bought into the concepts and the benefits of working in a different way.  The formalised feedback on the training event was excellent.  The business consultancy had done an amazing job.  So what had gone wrong?

Improving knowledge, skills and behaviours doesn’t always mean better results

In another example,  lack of effective leadership skills and behaviours had been identified as a big problem for this national organisation.  It was decided to re-design the leadership skills framework and to develop a programme for all senior leaders.   A set of behavioural standards were developed, and a methodology to measure changes was put in place.  A coaching and mentoring framework was agreed along with monthly action learning meetings.

There was a new spring in the step of leaders across the organisation.  They gave positive and enthusiastic feedback for the coaching and development programme.

When the 2nd annual employee feedback survey showed less than a 1% improvement in perceptions of employees, alongside results with marginal improvements, they were dumbfounded.

Great learning programmes don’t always result in improvements, but they should

Those examples are simply two of hundreds I have seen, when learning and development has been brought into an organisation; the learning has been evaluated and the content and application has been faultless. The organisation is absolutely clear about the improvements they want to see.  But yet, still, the expected results did not materialise.

Why is this?  As you know there are many factors which impel or motivate people to change the way they do things, and learning new skills, behaviours, knowledge or even raising awareness is just one part of the equation.

When your business is buying in development interventions, you want to be able to see a real return on investment, otherwise why would you use precious financial resources on it?   No one can completely guarantee a return on investment, but the chances of a return can be greatly improved, and more importantly you can pinpoint exactly why the return hasn’t been realised by introducing the following principles.

When I was asked to do some work for the organisation in the first example, the MD was frustrated that the learning he had bought in had not realised the outcomes he required, even though the learning providers had delivered the learning they had promised.

Seven simple principles

My first step was to establish the following 7 principles if I were going to take on the task of getting results:

1. A learning and development provider will facilitate a real return on investment in partnership with the commissioning organisation.
2. Learning must enable a measureable improvement or change by the learner.
3. The improvement or change must contribute to the overall outcomes for the organisation.
4. Each learner must develop a “call to action, or objective” where they are accountable for achieving the measureable improvement or change. 
5. The organisation must enforce accountability, usually through theirperformance management system.
6. The achievement collectively of “calls to action, or objectives”will result in a measured outcome for the organisation.
7. “If it is not possible to set individuals a call to action or objective which aligns with overall business objectives, following learning then the commissioning organisation should consider whether development is actually needed.

I agreed to deliver a short refresher programme, with a pragmatic design.   I explained unless the training included an accountable call to action for each employee, it would likely be unsuccessful once more, and so secured his agreement to establish accountability for achievement within the organisation.

We agreed at the end of the event, each employee would identify a work based objective to

• Improve, abandon or shorten a process and to quantify the savings.
• Improve customer service or increase customer satisfaction, with a measurable difference
• Reduce the number and type of complaints
• Create a measureable increase in quality

In  a 6 month period, 95% of employees met objectives,  outcomes were recorded and collectively it was calculated that almost  £1 million had been saved up to that point as a direct result of achievement of the outcomes or objectives.

Not only were amazing results achieved, employees felt an increased sense of ownership of the success of the initiative.  They had tangible evidence of their contribution and saw a real difference.

Incidentally, these principles will also work for individuals if you are thinking of buying in your own self-development programme.  For the majority of learning, unless it translates into accountable action, then it might be a “nice to have” but not necessarily an activity which will create signifcant change.

Christina has managed people for twenty seven years and led hugely successful teams. She has worked with people at all levels in various organisations to help them achieve their potential, and she has been actively involved in the learning and development field in a number of different roles.

People Discovery is a Leadership Development provider based in North East England, working globally.