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The ever present tension of bottom line results and culture

This does not become any easier especially since we live in a society that brings a focus on the short term - and the short term generally demands a focus on the bottom line. Stakeholders all too often want short term results and this usually means we ignore the impact on culture, and of course people.

We need to demand a focus on sustainability for the long term - from a people, brand and financial perspective. Too frequently we demand financial results at the complete expense of the people and brand - we need more creative thinking to find collaborative and holistic ways of managing this ever present tension.

Increasingly these stakeholders are customers/clients - are we prepared to allow them to dictate the way we treat our people and develop our brand? It is time to be courageous and stay true to culture and brand and have the courageous conversations with our customers.

Seth Godin – 7 Questions for (Courageous) Leaders

At Courageous Leaders we often ask leaders to ask themselves some challenging questions. Recently Seth Godin provided a list of 7 (actually 8 including the bonus) challenging questions, that encourage leaders to approach issues differently, be flexible and open, be collaborative and relinquish the need to be right. Read his post here.

These questions interestingly link to the key aspects of the Courageous Leaders Model:

Seth G - Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Connect and Commit - A courageous leader knows that both the facts AND the feelings, our intuitive sense of how to respond and our ability to share our stories are all equally important. By being open to facts, intuition and stories leaders enable connection and commitment throughout the organisation.

Seth G - What do you do with people who disagree with you... do you call them names in order to shut them down?
Courage - Rather than reacting, a courageous leader doesn’t react by trying to put others down, instead they courageously address the issue at hand.

 Seth G - [Bonus: Are you willing to walk away from a project or customer or employee who has values that don't match yours?]
Conviction - Courageous leaders truly own their values and question the behaviour of leaders, employees, customers and suppliers when it does not fit their values. When a partner or sales director brings in large amounts of business and behaves in a bullying or harassing manner to to others, what measures do you take if this is inconsistent to your values?

Seth G - Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?
Confidence – A courageous leaders has an inner confidence and is keen to share credit and recognition. Courageous leaders truly own their values and question the behaviour of leaders, employees, customers and suppliers when it does not fit their values.

Seth G – Are you open to multiple points of view or do you demand compliance and uniformity?
Seth G - How often are you able to change your position?
Change – for any twenty-first century leader, change is simply part of every day life.  Courageous leaders relish the opportunity to take in new information and change their point of view and way ofdoing business.  Note - A courageous leader sees change as an opportunity to develop and hone their leadership skills

Seth G - Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?
Challenge – A courageous leader is open to being challenged by others and discovering new ways to address opportunities and solve problems.

Seth G - If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?
Empowering others – (an outcome with the CL model) A courageous leader is willing to let go, to move aside when someone else has more knowledge, experience or passion for a project, issue or opportunity. Being a facilitator for others to achieve their best is an integral part of courageous leadership.

At Courageous Leaders we link all these qualities to Leadership Mastery, a cornerstone of our Courageous Leaders programs and workshops.

By Mandy Holloway & Fiona Pearman

Just how challenging can we be?

I facilitated a session recently on engaging in challenging conversations constructively and it was inspiring to hear everyone walk away willing to adopt the mantle of courageous leader and actively unleash the courage to have more of these conversations.

We explored the importance of these conversations to innovation, collaboration, engagement and high performance. All made logical sense.

Then we explored what holds us back then if the benefits are so great.

Fear of consequences holds people back - they do not want to make themselves vulnerable - as vulnerability is still seen by many people as weak.

I felt myself feeling disillusioned because challenging is still not embraced constructively - when emerging leaders unleash their courage to initiate a challenging conversation they are still being met far too often with a response that comes from positional power! So their vulnerability is rewarded with power - more opposing tensions at play - the other is that of fear and courage. These emerging leaders fear for their continued employment in the business - what a way to feel when you are about to engage in a challenging conversation.

Becoming your Ideal Self

I coached a young man who was finding the process of identifying his character and personality preferences, and integrating this with the behaviours (capabilities) he was choosing each day at work far too abstract. In an effort to make it concrete I related it back to his love of snow- skiing. He had skied from a very young age and in our sessions had often talked passionately about his skiing experiences. I suggested to him that integrating his personality preferences and character with his behaviour (capability) was like skiing ‘top to bottom’ down a black run (the black run is the most challenging run most of us can ski down in Australia.)

When your confidence and conviction in self mastery is well developed you stand at the top of the run, pick your line, bend your knees, lean forward in your boots, point your tips downhill and ‘go for it’ with an energy that is totally exhilarating. As you speed down the run you make corrections along the way but your belief in yourself sees you keep going until you get to the bottom. You are ‘in the zone’ – everything is aligned and everything is working together to support your choice of line and speed. You knew your skill was there but you did not need to focus on it – it was more about believing in yourself and wanting to experience the ‘high’ of picking the right line down the mountain. You are totally exhilarated and energised when you reach the bottom.

If your confidence is not well developed and you did not have this kind of integration of personality, character and capability you would ‘work your way’ down the black run – no ‘top to bottom’ for you. Standing at the top of the run you question your capability to get down and you talk to yourself about the capability level you need to bring so you can make it down – especially what kind of turns you need to make. You are highly aware of the terrain and the risks facing you. So you stand at the top of this slope and cautiously traverse across the top until you can pick the next few metres that appear ‘safe’. You continue this approach for the entire slope picking your way cautiously down and taking plenty of stops along the way to choose your next ‘path’. For most of the way down the slope you have doubts, feel fearful and even completely lost and out of control. You would feel relieved and exhausted when you made it to the bottom.

This story helped him to see and feel in a very concrete way what it meant to integrate his personality preferences, his character and his capability. It also helped him to understand why he was feeling so exhausted and out of control in the workplace because he had not yet managed to integrate his personality, character and capability. 

 

If you enjoyed reading this story there are plenty more in Mandy’s book – check out the information and order form on our website.

Finding your Sweetspot

The work of Martin Seligman and his colleague Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi have helped us to create a frame for finding your sweetspot. We acknowledge most of you have invested a significant amount of time developing capability – mostly intellectual skills – and you do not know enough about your personality preferences and character. 

For those who work feeling stressed, guilty or resentful it can so often be because they are operating counter to their personality preferences and character. Such leaders are finding their sweetspot very infrequently because they are defining who they are by their capability.

 

 As leaders decide to spend more time developing greater self mastery they create higher awareness of the personality preferences and character they bring to the way they use their intellectual capability . For those who want even further awareness they also explore ways to develop their emotional capability. When they do this they discover an enlarged sweetspot.
 
The ultimate sweetspot is where your capability is an integral ‘part’ of who you are but it is not what defines you. Your personality preferences and your character define how you interact and behave and you do this in a way that allows you to be at your best at all times. Feelings of guilt, resentment, anxiety are pushed away as you are ‘in the zone’ with how you choose to live with confidence, conviction and courage.

Don't let 'stuff' get in the way of a very real conversation

Relationships get bogged down in stuff and the stuff becomes more important than the relationship. A recent experience with a member of our Courageous Leaders Community highlighted this perfectly. Once we reaffirmed with each other that our relationship was strong, that the contextual issues we were facing were important and needed to be resolved however they were never going to be bigger and more important than our relationship - it freed us to have a number of brilliantly honest conversations where we each owned our stuff and shared it without fear of judgement or reprisal.

People need to find ways to do this with greater regularity in the workplace. Instead they fear what will happen when they raise the stuff and share their thoughts and feelings - so they don't have the conversation and the tension remains unresolved. This is why the Australian business culture is fraught with avoidance........we would rather say nothing and hope it all goes away and then we don't need to talk about it or hear it from the other person.

Courageous Leaders make the relationships more important than the stuff and so can courageously talk about the stuff, resolve it and not let it get in the way of a strengthened relationship.