Making Changes

As a consultant, performance coach and trainer, I am frequently asked if what I am doing with an organisation, an individual or a team will result in any real change. The answer is ... it depends!

And this is not just a flippant response.

Obviously organisations and individuals want the reassurance that the service they are paying for will result in a positive - and preferably measurable - outcome. That's great. I want the same thing too. There's nothing more frustrating for most of us than to feel as if nothing has changed when we complete a project.

So why does the answer depend, and what does it depend on?

Well let's remind ourselves that organisations and teams are comprised of people. Yep, I know this sounds obvious, but a lot of change management talk seems to ignore this inescapable fact.

So applying a people lense to change means that we can look at it from the perspective of some of the recent neurological research that has been conducted over the past 20 years or so. Now clearly I am no great expert in this field, but there has been plenty written about it over recent years. Indeed a lot of Daniel Goleman's work (our Emotional Intelligence guru) is based on the neurological research conducted by Joseph LeDoux.

Now we all know that making changes in our own lives is tough, and making changes in organisations can be even tougher. Some of you might even remember that piece of popular advice that it takes three weeks to break an old habit and three weeks to build a new one?

But what the neurological research has done, is provide us with a scientific basis for understanding why making change is so difficult.

Apparently our brains are constructed to quickly detect changes in our environment and unusual or different occurrences. The orbital cortex (sort of behind our eyes) generates these signals in our brain, and the orbital cortex is closely linked with the brain's fear circuitry - the amygdala.

These two sections of the brain (the amygdala and the orbital cortex) compete with the prefrontal cortex of our brain for attention (processing time and speed).

So what? Well it's the prefrontal cortex where our higher and more conscious cognitive processes occur.

When we are learning something new, we need our prefrontal cortex to be working hard.

Think about learning a new language, learning to drive, concentrating on developing your listening skills or whatever.

We need to consciously make the effort to master, think about and practise these skills. It's tiring too. Why?

Again the research has shown that using the prefrontal cortex uses more energy than using the part of the brain where our learned skills reside and can be enacted unconsciously (the basal ganglia).

So, what does this neurological research tell us about making changes?

It's going to take a conscious effort.
It's going to take more energy.
It's going to take some time before we can use the skills unsconsciously.
We will encounter some resistance within ourselves.

So, how do we begin to address these challenges?

The first point to note is that an individual, organisation or team will have to want to change. The coach, consultant or trainer cannot make the conscious effort or conduct all the practice that mastering the change will require. What we can do is provide the background knowledge, some scenarios for practice, and we can provide encouragement and positive feedback.

But probably the most important point to note is that an individual, organisation or team will need to arrive at their own solution. In other words, it has to be their plan. If they do that, then that desire to change is their own.

Corporate Pyschopath - or just a very naughty boss?

I frequently hear stories about bosses and managers yelling at their team, their advisers and probably at their loved ones too.

This stuns me.

It’s not just that this kind of behaviour is inappropriate in so many situations, it’s that it is downright ineffective. It’s dumb because it’s only in a tiny fraction of circumstances that team members or associates will respond to an invective filled diatribe.

In extreme cases, these people are often termed corporate psychopaths. But it's likely that the first seed of their extreme management behaviour was watered and even fertilised by the types of organisations in which we now find them.

There's been a lot written in recent years about corporate psychopaths. (See anything by Professor Emeritus Robert Hare from the University of British Columbia). These sociopaths are often manipulative, arrogant, callous, impatient, impulsive, unreliable and prone to fly into rages. They break promises, and take credit for the work of others and blame everyone else when things go wrong.

Does this sound like anyone you know? Someone you work with?

For organisations, this is dangerously infantile behaviour, so why are these corporate psychos drawn to the business world?

Well, perhaps not surprisingly but certainly a little perversely, business does value some of the traits that the corporate psycho brings. Some businesses want that mercenary attitude, the domineering approach, the ambition and the drive.

But what's the real cost?

The leadership style of these corporate psychopaths is really undeveloped and immature. In terms of emotional intelligence, they are neither self or socially aware. And this means that they are really constrained in their modes of operation. They switch rapidly from being overtly charming - even seductive, to bullying, ranting and threatening.

How do we deal with these people?

Here’s a useful measure of maturity. The Australian author, literary critic and social commentator Clive James suggests that “reality is the conquest of the self, not of the world”.

I think that this is a useful place to start. Sure, the emotions of certain situations are enough to push all of us over the edge ... occasionally. But if this is a standard way of leading or managing a team, something is drastically wrong. The manager has clearly lost control - certainly of themselves, probably of their team, and most likely the situation as well.

Self-control is a characteristic that is marked out as one of the key attributes of leaders with strong emotional intelligence. Flying into a rage when things don’t go your way, demeaning those around you or withdrawing into a near catatonic uncommunicative state are behaviours that we probably expect from small children - not our business and organisational leaders.

The corporate psycho or boss may get results for the firm in the short term, but it won't last. For the really intractable cases only professional psychological counselling will help, but perhaps the bigger issue is how all of us in our organisations respond to these sort of people. If we choose to do nothing, or just avoid or tolerate them, what kind of message does that send to the rest of our team? It's likely that we will get more of the same ...

Bad Bosses

Here's a headline ... there's a lot of bad bosses, managers and leaders in businesses and organisations worldwide.

Well, it's probably not such a headline. It doesn't surprise many of us really, does it?

Does it matter? Bad bosses can still get good results can't they?

It depends ...

Certainly it depends on what and how you measure good results. A bad boss may indeed be able to get some good business results - but not over time, and certainly not in the same organisation.

But the bottom line question is probably, will having good bosses in the business or organisation get better results?

Now, defining what a boss, a manager and a leader needs to do in a short blog is another challenge of brevity. But let's condense the role of a boss into two perhaps overly simplistic generalisations. For this blog's sake, let's assume that the role of a boss involves:

* managing tasks (the "technical" management skills: setting objectives, planning, implementing, controlling); and,
* managing people (the "relationship" management skills).

And let's make another assumption, that the business schools, universities and vocational training providers can do a reasonable job in training bosses in the first of these two roles - technical management.

So my question becomes, if a boss is good at managing people, does that mean that business results will improve?

An article in the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 April 2007 (page 68) provides part of the answer. The title of the article? 'Staff flee bad bosses, not companies'. (http://www.afr.com/home/)

The article opens by stating:

The historically low unemployment rate that is making it difficult for all sectors to find quality candidates, especially among the small pool of accounting and finance professionals, should encourage organisations to focus on their internal culture'.

In an Australian context, not only is the labour market tight - particularly for young professionals, knowledge workers and specific trade qualified workers - demographics point to the fact that the labour market is only going to become even tighter. The implications should be obvious. Attracting talented workers will be challenging enough, retaining them in a work culture of bad bosses will be impossible.

The executive general manager of Chandler Macleod's Recruitment Solutions (http://www.chandlermacleod.com.au) discussed a recent survey in the Australian Financial Review article that found that a whopping 82% of workers resigned from their jobs because of bad bosses!

How do we get good bosses from bad bosses?

My perspective is that many organisations spend a lot of time either providing in-house training on the technical management and job requirements - or focusing on these skills at the recruitment stage. But, very little time is spent on developing or selecting for the relationship management skills.

To me it's clear. Leadership, team and emotional intelligence skills are critical if an organisation is going to develop its bosses. If the business chooses not to, then its increasingly valuable team members will almost certainly choose to work somewhere else.

What's your organisation choosing to do?

Optimism, laughter and leadership

I’m always intrigued by the answers I get when I ask people how many terrific leaders or managers they have had in their working lives. Invariably the answer is very low. Often none, and never more than two or three. But why is that?

Simply put, it’s bloody hard to be a terrific leader. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up the challenge of becoming one.

In fact, one of the very real ways that terrific leaders distinguish themselves from the masses is their sense of optimism, and their ability to infect others with those same feelings.
John Seely Brown, the Chief Scientist at Xerox, describes this ability eloquently:

The art of making an impact through people is the ability to pull people together, to attract colleagues to the work, to create the critical mass ...To communicate is not just a matter of pushing information at another person, it’s creating an experience, to engage their gut - and that’s an emotional skill. (www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB.html)

An emotional skill? I have just been rereading Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s 2002 work Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with Emotional Intelligence (www.amazon.com/Primal-Leadership-Realizing-Emotional-Intelligence/dp/157851486X - 144k - 23 Mar 2007 -) and I was struck by their opening chapter as they argue that one of the most important roles of any leader is a “primal” role. That is, driving a team’s collective emotions in a positive direction and avoiding any “toxic” emotions.

Sounds a bit wishy washy doesn’t it? Certainly leaders have more sway over a team’s emotions than others. They tend to talk more, they have greater formal authority, and they are also often the team member who gets to frame the discussion.

I was really struck by a study that Goleman et al quoted that was run by Yale University School of Management in 1998. Not only did this study find that cheerfulness spreads more easily than depression (that’s got to be good news!), but upbeat moods increase cooperation, fairness and therefore business performance.

However, to me the most interesting thing of all was that these scientists also found that laughter was a terrific team performance barometer. Laughing together signals trust, comfort, empathy and a common view of the world.

About six weeks ago I caught up with about ten of my ex military mates for a very informal dinner and a few cold beers on a hot Melbourne evening. At work the next day I was struck by how sore my jaw muscles were. With my tetanus shots up to date I realised it was simply from spending so much of the previous evening laughing with my friends - a group that enjoys a strong sense of trust and a common view of the world.

So what? We probably all enjoy the company of our friends and a few laughs. How does optimism and laughter impact on the performance of a team, organisation or firm?

Psychologists regularly talk about “mirroring”. That is, how moods or emotions spread in a group of people through verbal and non-verbal signals in a relatively short period of time (less than 15 minutes). Ask yourself, who would you rather be working with, that touchy, cranky and domineering boss, or that optimistic and enthusiastic one? And that’s the first example of how optimism can positively impact your team performance. Optimistic people attract followers. Negative leaders repel them.

A second way in which optimism and laughter help is simply that by generating upbeat moods in teams, people view themselves, others and events more optimistically. This has been shown to enhance creativity and decision making skills.

Don’t believe me? Then take a look at a 2000 study in Administrative Science Quarterly (www.johnson.cornell.edu/publications/asq/) that looked at 62 Chief Executives and their leadership groups, comparing their energy, enthusiasm, determination, and emotional conflicts with their business results over time. The conclusion? The more positive the senior leadership team was, the more cooperatively they worked together and the better the business results.

So, think positively, enjoy a laugh and give off that vibe. Your team will thank you.