Vedere Consulting

Do You See the Beauty?

2012-06-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

I was looking through a box of old photographs and found a picture of myself taken when I was in college. A friend interested in photography wanted to practice and had taken and developed this picture and several others. I remember distinctly how disappointed I was when I saw the result of his work. Disappointed is too mild a word. I hated it. I thought my hair was stringy and flat, my lips were too big—I just didn’t fit the image of beauty I had in my head. I dumped all the photos in a box and basically forgot about them.

Seeing that photo recently almost took my breath away. The young woman staring back at me was beautiful. She had full lips and fresh skin with a sprinkling of freckles and clear, open eyes. She looked knowledgeable and innocent—so alive, with her life stretched out before her.

Looking at this picture, I felt sad for that vibrant young woman who couldn’t see how beautiful and gifted she was. Yet isn’t that so often the way? We pay so much attention to what’s wrong, we fail to see what’s right. You get one bad grade and it erases all the good marks. You get one bad evaluation and suddenly that’s all you can focus on. One bad thing happens during the day and suddenly it seems like everything is going wrong.

There’s actually a physiological reason for this. Our brains are hardwired to focus on the negative. Rick Hanson (http://www.rickhanson.net/ ) says negative thoughts are like Velcro and positive thoughts are like Teflon—the negative gets our attention and stays in our minds much longer.

Why does this happen? According to Hanson, our brains are constantly scanning our environment for threats and for things that attract us. For early man, attractors were food, shelter or potential mates and threats were animals and others things that could kill. But threats were stronger than attractors. Look at it this way. If a bush was shaking and early man couldn’t see what was behind it, there was the potential for a threat (a large, man-eating animal looking for lunch) or an attractor (a game animal or friendly human). If you made a mistake and passed up food or a mate, you lived to try again. If you made a mistake and it was the hungry beast, you didn’t contribute to the gene pool. So we learned to focus on threats first.

That worked great when our very survival was challenged every day. But the challenges are different now. We know from many researchers that positive emotions make us more creative and more open to new ideas—characteristics we need to respond to today’s constantly changing environment. Hanson says it takes six positive thoughts to equal the strength of one negative thought. That’s why it behooves us to focus on the positive, to see what’s right with our performance, with our bodies, with ourselves. If we aren’t intentional about this, we will miss our beauty, our gifts, and our potential contributions to the world. And that truly is a shame.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Tips for Making E-mail Work for You: Part 2

2012-05-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of my blog know that I’ve learning to manage my e-mail volume so that it doesn’t overwhelm me on a daily basis. My April 5 blog post outlined a series of steps I’ve been taking to get my e-mail under control. I’m still following those tips for the most part (although I sometimes fall off the weekly planning routine wagon) and e-mail is much better. That doesn’t mean I don’t still feel overwhelmed. So today, I want to share a second technique with you, and believe me, it’s something completely different.

The technique is from Suzanne Zeman, somatic business coach and author of the book Listening to Bodies, A Somatic Primer (http://www.somaticbusinesscoach.com/). Suzanne’s coaching practice combines traditional business coaching and somatic coaching. Somatic coaching is coaching that brings awareness to the body and how the body is responding (often unconsciously) and shaping our responses to our world.

What Suzanne taught me is to breathe and to become aware of my body’s length, width and depth, particularly its width. Focusing on width, Suzanne says, “you can experience confidence in your capacity to hold more commitments.” OMG that’s what I need—confidence that I can hold all my commitments!

So I tried breathing in the way she taught and focusing on my body and extending my width outward. I know this sounds weird, but it worked. I don’t know that I necessarily got more done, but I was much calmer and less overwhelmed, more able to see that I would get it all done eventually. That means I am doing a better job discerning what needs to be done, better at coming up with more creative short cuts, and more energized and cheerful when I have to work longer hours. In short, I’ve expanded my capacity to hold more commitments! I’ve been trying this for a few weeks now and am amazed at the difference it makes.

If you want to try it, here are her instructions (they are in her book):

“To open your width, bring your breath to the mid-torso level, feeling your ribs expand and relax and in inhale and exhale. Then extend your energy in the horizontal direction, by expanding energetically through the sides of your structure. You may want to open and lift your arms, as though holding a giant ball—this can help you open your energetic width to become a more open container for all that you’re holding. Let yourself open to this dimension when you feel overwhelmed, alone and despondent, or when you want to securely hold all the commitments you have made to the people you care about. Continue practicing opening the dimension of width, and note your responses to the following:

What do you experience as you ‘get wider’?

How do other people appear when you open this dimension?

How do you experience your capacity as you widen your structure?”

Isn’t this interesting? If it appeals to you, give it a try. The results are fascinating. (BTW: yesterday’s e-mail took less than 30 minutes total to process).

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

What Makes A Great Workplace?

2012-05-02T12:23:00.001-07:00

You can hardly pick up a book or article on leadership these days without hearing how important the development of good relationships is to individual and organizational success. How do we know that’s true?

A number of research studies have identified the importance of relationships in successful workplaces, but a study often cited was conducted by the Gallup organization in the late 1990’s. Gallup set out to discover the factors that separated organizations that were successful in finding, focusing and keeping talented employees from organization that didn’t have this competitive edge. When they began the study, Gallup researchers didn’t know if salaries or benefits or perks or leadership made the difference.

To find their measure of organizational effectiveness, Gallup turned to the over one million interviews they had conducted over a 25 year period. They had been measuring factors in the workplace that managers could control and that pointed to higher employee satisfaction. They were looking for patterns in these questions and they were particularly interested in teasing out the survey questions that loyal and engaged employees answered affirmatively but average or poor performers answered negatively or neutrally. The idea was to identify only the factors that appealed to highly motivated and talented employees.

When all was said and done and the factor analysis, regression analysis and concurrent validity studies were finished, twelve factors emerged from the data as the most important indicators of an organization’s ability to attract and retain the most talented employees. These factors are:

Clear work expectations
Equipment and materials to do job right
Opportunity to “do what I do best” every day
Recognition and praise (within the past seven days)
Someone cares about me as a person
Individual development and growth is encouraged
My opinion is valued
Company’s mission/purpose makes me feel my job is important
Co-workers committed to quality work
Close relationship at work
Frequent conversations about progress
Opportunities to learn and grow

What patterns do you notice when you look at these twelve factors? Clearly, a significant number are determined by the employee’s immediate boss and most of them require relationship building skills and focus. A manager is not going to be good at setting clear work expectations (which requires a conversation), knowing their employees’ strengths, demonstrating care and concern, connecting the work to the organization’s mission, and providing useful opportunities to learn if they cannot build trusting relationships or if they don’t take the time to build them.

Relationship building requires a level of self mastery—learning to bite your tongue until the right moment to have a difficult conversation. It requires self awareness—the ability to recognize your own emotions, observe them objectively and use them as clues to determine what you need from yourself and others. It requires empathy—the ability to recognize what others are feeling and to communicate understanding and acceptance in difficult times. Self mastery, self awareness and empathy are the cornerstones of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is now identified as equally important to long term success as IQ. Fortunately, emotional intelligence can be learned. I invite you to explore the tools page on my website for some great resources or to call me about ways to learn more.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

The Power of Vulnerability

2012-04-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

Morgan Jon Fox, a gay rights activist and filmmaker, did almost the exact opposite of what he planned to do when he finally had the opportunity to debate John Smid, the executive director of Love in Action, a fundamentalist Christian organization that encouraged gay and lesbian teens and adults to renounce their homosexuality and become “ex-gay.” Fox had been instrumental in on-going protests against Love in Action’s Refuge program for teens.

Armed with six pages of points, Fox planned, according to an interview aired on this week’s This American Life radio broadcast “Own Worst Enemy” (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=462&podcast=1) in a segment entitled “Just as I Am,” to give what he described as “an eloquent argument” for his perspective when he finally had the opportunity to meet Smid.

Instead, after an awkward silence, he started telling his story—about his childhood and when he came out, about the pain he felt when he wasn’t accepted by friends and family, and how it felt being in a committed relationship and how much healthier he felt. Smid, interviewed in the same broadcast, said “this is not what I expected. This guy seems to be vulnerable and honest and humble.” That moment began what is so rare today—an honest and respectful dialogue from different perspectives on the political spectrum—and over time a transformative experience for both men.

Birute Regine,www.facebook.com/birute.regine, in her book Iron Butterflies, defines vulnerability as “a profound experience of openness.” In her interviews with over 50 successful women, her surprising finding was that vulnerability was “the doorway to change.” Brene Brown, a social science researcher, studied people with a strong sense of worth. What startled her is that the people who had the strongest sense of self worth actually embraced vulnerability—they believed that “what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.”

Brown says that in order to be authentic, the people with high self worth believed they have to “be willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they are.” Our culture has traditionally has shunned vulnerability with the thought that leaving ourselves open leaves us open to attack. And that is to some extent true. Yet, as Birute and Brene demonstrate in their research, that vulnerability is paradoxically what makes us strong, what helps us grow into bigger ways of being, what helps us connect to the people around us and helps us build the relationships we need for success.

In what ways are you willing to open yourself to others? How can you share your own experience? How can you listen and connect instead of overpower and outsmart?

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Conflict? One Question Can Make All the Difference

2012-04-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

This week, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to myself and several other people—in different instances—get angry at someone else. You know the drill. All of us were using words like “manipulative,” “inconsiderate,” “taken advantage of,” “anal,” or “depressed,” to describe the people who had triggered the loop of accusations in our heads. It’s an automatic response, I think. Something happens to hurt, frustrate or anger us and we’re off and running with explanations about what the person was doing and thinking and what their motivations were. Each explanation makes us more frustrated and more hopeless that anything will ever change.

One question changed this downward spiral. That question was, “what did you want in this situation that you weren’t getting?” For each person--client, friend, me, that question stopped us in our tracks. It changed the trajectory of the conversation. Each of us had to stop and think. “What did we want?” We had been so focused on how we had been wronged and why we had been wronged, we were totally clueless.

Marshall Rosenberg (http://www.cnvc.org/about/marshall-rosenberg.html ), whom I have mentioned many times, calls this shift of attention from the outer issue to the inner need, “shining the light of consciousness” on the thing that is most likely to help us. Because if we understand the need we have that isn’t being met, we have a much better chance of doing something to get it addressed.

This has proved to be true time and time again as I have wrestled with my own issues, worked with my clients and listened to my friends. For one of us it was “time in my garden.” For another it was “acknowledging how hard it is for me to manage the kids by myself.” For a third it was “trust that I will take care of it.” Each time a person “got” the need, you could sense the shift in the conversation. There was a sigh (was it of relief?) and an upward movement of the eyes (which signals thinking) and problem solving language, “maybe I could just say I need help.” The whole tone of the conversation was different—it was more hopeful, more empowered, more optimistic.

I believe this kind of shift in our conversation and our thinking is critical if we are to have more satisfying lives and relationships—at home and at work. One question, thoughtfully answered, can make all the difference. Susan Scott, in Fierce Conversations, said, “our work, our relationships, and, in fact, our very lives succeed or fail, gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time.” Each conversation matters. What type of conversation do you want to have?

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Tips for Making E-mail Work for You—Part 1

2012-04-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

I sent out a call for help a couple of weeks ago—my e-mail was getting totally out of control. It was taking me 2-3 hours to get through it all and often I left some of it undone. Even more debilitating was the way I felt after an e-mail session—drained, discouraged, ineffective and overwhelmed. I believed e-mail was forcing me to focus on the petty instead of the important and often I often had a nagging sense I was letting something important fall through the cracks.

Several readers sent me interesting tips about handling e-mail and I decided to try some of them as well as do some exploring on my own. This is what I’ve learned so far. I began with what I already know works:

· Set aside 2-3 times a day to check your e-mail. Resist the temptation to constantly check it. Those interruptions cost you a lot of wasted time because it takes your brain a few seconds to refocus on your task after you are distracted. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone to e-mail to SEND a message only to start looking at what’s there. After a few minutes I’ve forgotten why I opened Outlook up in the first place and I’m staring at the screen trying to remember (this is getting worse as I get older).

· Turn off your alarm so you don’t know new items are coming in. I just did this (finally) and it was easy to do—I found out how using the Help function.

· Create folders to store e-mails you want to revisit. Leaving them in your inbox just clutters it up and makes it harder to find what you really need. I have both long term storage folders and weekly to-do folders for things I know I’ll need to refer to frequently or soon.

· At least once a day sync your smartphone with your computer system so you're not keeping two different "lists" or calendars.

My dear friend, non-profit executive Robbin Peach, showed me her system for managing e-mail and her ideas sparked a quest that led me to “personal productivity guru” David Allen and his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity. So far, the ideas he outlined that I adopted have worked wonders. My average e-mail processing time per day is less than one hour and I’m actually getting through it all and staying on top of where everything is. A word of warning, though. It took a lot of work and time to get there.

Allen’s ideas encompass much more than e-mail and honestly, that’s what I needed. In a nutshell, they are:

1. Capture anything and everything that has your attention and concern. I decided to use Outlook tasks to get everything in one place. Allen recommends putting every idea you have on that list—that way it’s not floating around in your head somewhere creating tension.

2. The next step is to define each task in terms of an outcome (what do you want to accomplish) and then to write down the first step you need to take to get that task done. This was hard, but I found out it was the most liberating part of Allen’s system. I didn’t have to plan a whole project, I just had to figure out what is the next concrete thing I needed to do. Things like make a phone call, find an estimate, etc.

3. Allen’s third step is to organize all these tasks in a streamlined way, in categories, based on how and when you need to access it. I created a number of categories in Outlook, assigned them bright colors I could easily recognize and then organized my list based on the category. Therefore all my coaching, professional development, business development and financial tasks are all in one place.

4. Schedule regular times to review your lists and put tasks on your calendar or daily to do list. I’m doing this once a week—at the same time I review my mission statement and overarching goals. (People who know me are laughing now—they can’t believe I’m doing this). These higher goals never fail to inspire me and motivate me to focus on what’s really important.

5. For e-mail, organize your e-mail first by sender. You can then quickly delete any unwanted mail that made it through your spam filter. Next, tackle each e-mail. If it takes 2 minutes or less to respond, take care of it right then. If not, it goes on your task list and you define it in terms of outcome and next action. Or you can assign it to a folder and then create a regular time to go through the folders and deal with these items.

It took me several days, working in chunks, to get this system organized. But so far, it’s working really well.

For more information on David Allen and his GTD system, go to http://www.davidco.com/.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Think Positive to Get the Best Results

2012-03-29T09:18:00.002-07:00

I was inspired some months ago by seven executives in the federal government who I had the privilege of working with as part of a leadership development program at the Federal Executive Institute. I’ve facilitated many such groups there and all have been wonderful. What made this group stand out, though, was their positive outlook.

It started the first day of the program. On day one, the group is given a simple task, which is to explain what it’s like to be an executive in the federal government today, and to explain it in a creative way. There is always moaning about the creative part, but groups usually buckle down and get it done—generally having fun identifying all the problems inherent in making things happen in a bureaucracy. This time one executive stood out. He kept identifying the positive goal, the benefit of an idea, the opportunity inherent in the challenge, what people were doing right.

It seemed to catch on. By the third day of the program, when the group lost a competition, a number of people acknowledged what didn’t work but chose to focus primarily on what went right. There was a lot of praise and support. By the fifth day, every executive in the group was giving positive feedback to every other member of the group as they shared tough challenges.

If it sounds like Pollyanna, the group’s positive behavior is backed up by research. Marcial Losada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcial_Losada, in his research on the differences between high and low performing teams, found that high performing teams (based on profitability, customer satisfaction, and colleague evaluations) had a 6:1 ratio of positive to negative statements. That means teams where praise is more common than criticism, opportunities are more visible than obstacles, and learning is more valued than blame perform better at the bottom line. Team members think bigger, come up with more creative solutions, overcome more obstacles and have more fun.

This team of executives sure did. At the end of the program, each executive has to identify a transformative challenge they are prepared to undertake to improve their corner of the federal government. While everyone had fun, at the end of the day the executives in this group came up with the most ambitious plans for change, the most concrete steps for getting there, and the clearest ideas for how to improve their own capacity as leaders I have ever seen.

It sounds counterintuitive, because most of us have been taught our whole lives to focus on problems and what to fix instead of what’s working. But Losada and others are pointing the way to a new level of awareness. Look at what’s right, take time to praise, look for opportunity.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

The E-Mail Curse—A Call for Help

2012-03-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

E-mail! It’s the best of times and the worst of times but I’m having a hard time remembering its virtues. All I’m thinking about are the hours it takes each day to get my in-box under control. Don’t get me wrong—I get a lot of valuable work done in those hours. At the same time, I think with e-mail I’m often focusing on the urgent instead of the important. Some strategic initiatives are languishing while I respond to all the requests for my attention.

I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve read a lot on managing your e-mail. Sales coach Laura Posey recommended deleting it all and starting over. (Hmmmm, tempting. . . .). I’ve heard complaints from colleagues and clients. I’ve even made suggestions to some of them about how to manage their e-mail accounts.

But guess what, I’m stumped when it comes to managing my own e-mail and I need help. So I’m taking a different tack in this week’s blog. I’m asking for advice. What are the best strategies you know for making e-mail productive without taking up hours out of your day? Please comment on this post or send me an e-mail directly at plum@vedereconsulting.com or if you’re tired of writing call me at 804-261-6483. My commitment back is to do some additional research and write a blog about the best ideas I get.

Thanks in advance.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Leaders Make Up Their Own Minds

2012-03-09T12:41:00.001-08:00

I had a session with a very special client who was gleefully telling me how she broke the rules. She had learned in many leadership classes how to confront an employee about performance issues—you tell them directly and objectively what they are doing you don’t like, set clear expectations about what you do want, give them what they need to be successful and move forward. One thing you would never do is address an issue to the entire team and treat a single performance issue as a group reminder.

My client did the opposite. She had a group meeting where she discussed positivity (the behavior she wanted from her employee) with the whole team and decided to have a follow up meeting with the person in question without ever mentioning the “problem.” She chose instead to focus on the times when the employee was demonstrating the behavior she wanted. My client told me, “[this person] is a lot like me. Pointing out her mistakes will not work. She wants to do well. Someone who wants to do well doesn’t need to be hammered, they need to be redirected.”

I have no doubt this somewhat unorthodox method will work. Why? Because my client has successfully diffused a number of tricky situations and has created the strong and supportive team environment she has always wanted. More importantly, she has learned to rely on her own judgment—trusting in all she has learned, her experience and her empathy to show her the way. It is an inner directed rather than outer directed approach to leading.

It wasn’t always this way. For many years, my client lived by the rules. Her upbringing was strict and hierarchical. If an authority told you to do something, you did it, no questions asked. This is typical of what Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, in their book Immunity to Change, (http://www.amazon.com/Immunity-Change-Potential-Organization-Leadership/dp/1422117367/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331325577&sr=1-1) describe as the lowest plateau of three in adult mental complexity, the socialized mind. Kegan and Lahey use terms like “team player,” “faithful follower,” “seeks direction,” and “reliant” to describe this mindset.

As you can see, there is nothing wrong with these characteristics. Many valuable employees can be characterized this way. The problem with the social mind is that we live in a world that is increasing complex. The more complex the world becomes, the more mental complexity it demands of us. Development of our mental complexity and the mental complexity of those we lead becomes critical to our ultimate success in a changing world.

Mental complexity is not about IQ. Mental complexity is not abstract thinking. Higher plateaus of mental complexity, the “self-authoring mind” and the “self-transforming mind” are characterized by the ability to follow your own compass, recognize the strengths and limits of your thinking, to observe yourself, to find your own voice. It is these characteristics that support greater innovation, self direction and personal responsibility.

Growing into these higher levels of mental complexity isn’t easy. It requires stepping out of the way you have approached a problem to look at it from a completely new perspective. It is much more than learning a new technique, it requires fundamental shifts in thinking. It requires trying new things, experimenting, being open to questioning what you have always believed. Yet when you make that shift, transformational change is possible one step at a time.

My client is a great example of this. One by one she started questioning assumptions about life and work she had held her whole life. She tested those assumptions and by trying something different—taking small steps that dominoed into a giant leap. Now she thinks for herself. She still listens to authority, but she makes up her own mind and acts accordingly. That, to me, is the mark of a true leader.

For more information on Kegan and Lahey’s work, see http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/leadership/LP3-4.html or http://www.learningforward.org/news/jsd/kegan233.pdf .

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Profound Change Begins with a Single Step

2012-02-29T17:48:00.002-08:00

I have the privilege of working with so many wonderful clients and I am grateful each day for the many lessons they have taught me. One of the most profound is the power of a single habit conscientiously cultivated to create positive change in unexpected ways and places. I’ve seen this happen so many times that I now encourage clients to pick one single thing to work on and to see what happens. Almost invariably, the habit produces ripples that spread into sometimes unrelated areas.

For example, one client decided that an important change for him was to reach out to members of his family he had been out of touch with for years. He set up a schedule of phone calls and each week talked to a different member of his family. For many reasons, this was a risk for him, but the effort turned out to be tremendously rewarding personally. The unexpected consequence, however, was how this habit influenced his behavior at work. Generally cautious in his decision making, he was sometimes a bottleneck as he looked at things from every angle before deciding. After reaching out to his family, he became more willing to take a risk at work, to make a decision without knowing for certain it was the right one.

Another client determined that he needed to get out of his office more and connect with the people who worked for him on their turf. He was a very hard-charging executive and spent a lot of time in his office tackling a very large workload. Initially he had been skeptical about spending time out of the office, afraid it would take too much time. What he found, however, was that the interchanges with his staff turned out to be a lot of fun. They not only energized him, but staff members started making suggestions for ways to get things done faster or they were eager to take on some of the tasks the executive hated. Bottom line, this executive saved time by wandering around. So much so that for the first time, he saw the possibility of a better work/life balance than he had ever dreamed would be possible.

In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, Charles Duhigg demonstrates how habits can transform people or entire companies. He calls these habits "keystone habits." "One of the characteristics of a keystone habit is that it creates a culture. That's why it seems to have such a profound influence on other patterns in our lives," Duhigg said in a recent interview on NPR’s “Marketplace” http://www.npr.org/2012/02/27/147296743/how-you-can-harness-the-power-of-habit.

Duhigg cited Paul O’Neill’s ascension as CEO of Alcoa as an example. At the time, labor/management relations had soured after a number of strikes. O’Neill made his number one priority not profits or efficiency, but “’ transforming worker safety habits within this company, so that we have zero injuries.’” By focusing on an area where labor and management could agree, O’Neill transformed the culture and made Alcoa more efficient and profitable in the process.

Today’s executives face an overwhelming number of challenges. But the lesson from my clients is clear. Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Find a single habit to develop that speaks to your core goal. Stick to that habit faithfully. Observe the results. And watch for the ripples. Change may not be so hard after all.

Use “The World’s Simplest Idea” to Inspire

2012-02-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

Simon Sinek has discovered what he claims is “the world’s simplest idea” to explain the common quality that is shared by the world’s greatest leaders and organizations. Almost four million people have viewed his TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html , so obviously his idea is resonating with a lot of people. He calls it “The Golden Circle” and it looks like this:

Golden Circle

View more PowerPoint from plumcluverius

What represents what we do—tangible things that we all know and can easily articulate, like products and services. How is the way we do it--what makes our product or service special. Why is the purpose—it’s what makes us get out of bed in the morning, it’s what inspires us. Why is not about making money. Money, according to Sinek, is a by-product of what you do. Why is about something deeper and closer to the heart.

Most organizations and people move from the outside in, focusing on the outer two rings—the how and the what. These are more tangible, clear and easy to describe. Great leaders and organizations do exactly the opposite, they communicate and work from the inside out—they start with why.

This golden circle, this working from the inside out, is working from the fuzzy to the tangible, from the difficult to communicate to the easiest to communicate. But it is the most effective. The Wright brothers' story, one of Sinek's examples, demonstrates why. The Wright brothers were in a race with many others to be the first to fly. A serious competitor for the honor was Samuel Pierpont Langley. Langley was well capitalized, with a $50,000 grant from the US Army. He was connected to Harvard and the Smithsonian, so he had access to the best minds, and he was well known—the New York Times was chronicling his every move. Contrast that with the Wright brothers. Their only funding came from the profits of their bicycle shop. No one working on their team had a college education and no one had ever heard of them. The key difference between the two was that Langley was working for fame and money—to be the first. The Wright brothers had a vision of how flight would change the world and they gave that vision everything they had.

Sinek says, “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.” The same is true for organizations like Apple or leaders like Martin Luther King. They are successful because they can articulate what they believe, the why of their existence, and others who share that why want to be part of it.

This idea isn’t new, but it is simple and powerful. I’ve experienced myself how people are moved almost mysteriously to action, to give everything they’ve got, because someone was able to articulate something deep that resonated with them. The same is true for selling. People will buy what you sell because they believe what you believe. But recognizing and articulating the why isn’t easy. That’s why so few companies or leaders do it.

Sinek explains that the neocortex, the part of the brain that controls rational thought and language is focused on what and how. The limbic system, the seat of our emotional response and motivation, answers why. It does not have a language component. It only feels. So we get a feeling about something but find it hard to describe what it is we are feeling. I believe too, as Marshall Rosenberg described in his book Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life, that we have not been taught to focus on what we feel or what we need—and therefore we often are blind to this important information and don’t know how to talk about it.

To me, the skills of turning inward, of paying attention to feelings, needs and wants and describing them to others are the building blocks we need to develop our capacity to identify the why—the why of our work, the why of our organization, the why of our lives. If we can learn to identify that why, then we can inspire others to connect with us, to share our vision, and give their all.

Can We Be Compassionate in an Election Year?

2012-02-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

I was re-reading the beginning of one of my favorite books, Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life, and was struck by his assertion that his method of communicating, which he calls Non-Violent Communication or NVC, is based on “language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human even under trying conditions” (italics mine). Wow! This year’s political atmosphere is certainly trying. Just reading the newspaper or listening to the radio usually leaves me feeling angry, frustrated or depressed. I don’t think I’m alone. I would love to remain human and compassionate (or even dispassionate) in the midst of the political debate.

It’s often difficult to even bring up political subjects unless one is sure one’s listeners are fairly like-minded politically—yet I believe we need political discourse and cross pollination now more than ever. No one really has all the answers. Yet the discourse is often so heated, vitriolic even, that understanding all perspectives seems impossible.

Rosenberg was fascinated from an early age with understanding what disconnects us from our compassionate nature and how people have been able to remain compassionate even in situations as difficult as a concentration camp. He believes that compassion is our natural state and, like Ghandi, that it returns to us “when violence has subsided from the heart.”

He found several types of communication that separate us from our compassionate nature. The first is making moralistic judgments. These are judgments that imply wrongness or badness when someone acts counter to our values. Blaming, insults, criticism, labels, comparisons and diagnoses are all examples of moralistic judgments. Comparing yourself to others is also a form “life-alienating communication” as Rosenberg terms it and so is using language that denies our responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings and actions.

This list of life-alienating communications pretty much sums up the way we all communicate—often. Who hasn’t compared themselves favorably or unfavorably to others? Who hasn’t said “you made me do it” or criticized someone for getting it wrong or labeled someone as “lazy” or “incompetent”? Rosenberg says that this type of communication takes away our compassion and often doesn’t get us what we want or need.

Why is that? Rosenberg believes that what lies at the bottom of our judgments or blame is an unmet need. We need something, often unconsciously, and because we’re not getting it, we blame something or someone else. He said a different way to communicate—one that not only allows our compassionate nature to flourish but helps us get our needs met more effectively—is to focus on our own experience and try to discover what we really need and how others can help us get it.

The four components of our experience are:

Separating our observations (what actually happened) from our judgments. Doing so allows us to use neutral, non-blaming language to describe what we don’t like.
Identifying our feelings and separating judgments from feelings. The act of honing in on our emotions and naming them rather than acting them out gives us greater objectivity and clarity.
Identifying what we need and want that we are currently not getting in this situation. This is probably the hardest thing to do because we are so used to judging or blaming behavior (that politician is an idiot!) and often are completely out of touch with the need behind it (I want to know that my perspective will be heard—that I can influence the process). Identifying our underlying need gets to the heart of why we are angry or upset and can help us think creatively about how to move forward.
Identifying what specific and positive action another person could take to meet that need and framing that action as a request rather than a demand. Trying to force someone to change usually backfires. Requests open rather than close the dialogue.

I love this idea of draining violence from our hearts and opening ourselves to our natural compassion. Our business relationships, our personal lives, and our political conversations can all benefit. And really, in all of the above, aren’t the stakes too high not to try?

For more information, see http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_14?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=marshall+rosenberg+nonviolent+communication&sprefix=Marshall+rosen%2Caps%2C217

One Simple Way to Be More Productive

2012-02-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a time management video (yes, video) I saw back in the mid-1980’s. In that video, there is a beautiful scene where a man is fly fishing in a sun-dappled stream surrounded by green woods and a golden meadow. He is casting his line slowly and carefully to a rhythm that is obviously his own. He is lost in that world and time has, for that moment, become irrelevant to him.

Contrast that scene with a typical workday, when from the moment you wake up to a ringing alarm until you go to bed, time is a constant. You get up at a certain time, you leave for work and arrive at a certain time, you have scheduled meetings, phone calls, lunch appointments. In the evening, if you’re watching TV, your shows come on at a certain time. You may have another scheduled meeting or dinner engagement. We are ruled by the clock.

One of the main points of the video I mentioned is that this reliance on scheduled, structured time is antithetical to the way our bodies work. Just as there are rhythms and cycles in nature (day and night, the change of the seasons), our bodies have rhythms of their own that are not dictated by the hours in the day. We have our own circadian rhythms (cycles of sleep and wakefulness) and ultradian rhythms (a cycle of rest and activity that occurs every 90 – 120 minutes during our waking hours). Nature and our genetic makeup play a part in shaping our unique rhythms.

In our non-stop culture, it’s easy to ignore our bodies’ rhythms. We have caffeine to keep us awake and sleep aids to help us sleep. But ignoring these rhythms puts our health at risk and surprisingly it also puts our productivity and effectiveness at risk. We need unstructured time to be able to perform at our best. That unstructured time rests us, restores us and gives us the ability to go on. If we don’t give it to ourselves, our bodies end up taking it in one form or another. It could be getting to the point where our concentration falters and it starts taking us longer and longer to get something done. It might take the form of an exhausted evening where we are too tired to connect or create. It might take the form of a greater susceptibility to everyday illnesses or, more seriously, a long-term health issue.

Of course vacations can be a fantastic way to rest. I love vacations where the entire weekend or week is unstructured. I get up, eat, exercise, engage when my body wants to. But we don’t have to go on a long vacation to get the restorative power of unstructured time. In our waking hours, we are able to keep our full attention on a task for a 90 – 120 minute interval. After that, our minds start to wander and we have more difficulty concentrating. If we pay attention to that natural cycle of activity and rest, we can give ourselves very short breaks during the day where time can stand still. An absorbing book at lunch, a two minute breathing exercise or meditation, a brisk walk outside, giving our full attention to a song we love—all these take away the clock, even if it’s only for a moment. With that break, we can engage again at a high productivity level until our body says it’s time for another break.

In what ways can you lose yourself today? Isn’t ironic that by stopping for just a minute you can actually accomplish more?

How to Win (or Lose) Customer Trust

2012-01-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

A recent shopping experience reminded me how important it is to earn the trust of your customers and how easy it is to lose it when you don’t pay attention to all three aspects of trust building. Here’s what happened. On Sunday, I was ecstatic. After a frustrating day shopping at virtually every appliance store in my hometown, hours of online research and surprising levels of ignorance about the product from sales staffs, I found the perfect dishwasher—energy efficient, attractive, reliable, functional and affordable—and a sales rep with surprising levels of knowledge who helped me compare a variety of products before I settled on my purchase. My trust in the company where I bought my appliance (a big box retailer who shall remain nameless) was sky high—this is where I would buy any appliance or electronic equipment I ever needed! Surely this was a place where customer service still lived!

On Wednesday, the dream turned into a nightmare when I found the delivery crew sitting on the floor staring blankly at the place where my new dishwasher should go. “We can’t install this,” they told me, “you need a plumber.” “Interesting,” I thought. “If you need a plumber, why not send one.” In fact, another store I visited said they only sent plumbers on dishwasher installations. But this company didn’t even have access to a plumber so back the dishwasher went and another store got my business. I doubt I’ll ever shop at said big box retailer again—at least not until this memory has faded and never for something I can’t install myself.

The answer to why that store won and lost my trust so quickly is very simple. According to Julio Olalla, master coach (www.newfieldnetwork.com) and author of From Knowledge to Wisdom, trust has three corners, like the points on a triangle. The first corner is competence, which means I believe you can do what you say you can do, the second is commitment—I believe you will do what you say you can do, and the third is intent—I believe your intention is to support me or at least to do me no harm. All three of these points must be present before trust can exist.

Lately, many companies have seemed to realize how important it is to build relationships with customers—to be polite and respectful no matter what. The two installers on my floor couldn’t have been more courteous. However, like my big box retailer, organizations who don’t deliver on all of the three points--competence, commitment and intent, risk losing the trust of customers, of employees, of investors.

How to Get Where You Want to Go

2012-01-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Like many of us, my son John is a busy man. He’s in graduate school and has big dreams about where he wants to go and what he wants to do. Achieving those goals means a lot of sacrifice and discipline now—hard courses, much research, publishing and presenting papers. There’s a lot riding on how he does now and that means he’s under considerable pressure.

I asked him recently if he ever felt overwhelmed or anxious. His answer taught me a valuable lesson--one I’ve heard before but it was somehow more memorable coming from him. He said that you can’t think about the whole road at once. If you think about everything you have to get done, all the obstacles you have to overcome, it’s easy to get discouraged. But if you focus on the step in front of you right now, complete that step and then move on to the next a big dream becomes much more doable.

Equally important, each day you have to concentrate on the one or two most important things you need to get done that day. Not the easy ones or the urgent ones (think e-mail!) but the important ones. What tasks move the ball down the field toward your ultimate goal?

It’s simple advice, really. But for those of us who have been afraid to dream big or who go through each day stressed out and exhausted, that simple advice is profound. I often encourage my clients to challenge themselves to set a powerful and challenging goal for themselves and then to identify only the first step toward that goal. Complete that first step and then decide the next one. Your progress is organic and takes advantage of the opportunities that show themselves unexpectedly. You stay on track and can end each day with a sense of accomplishment.

So thank you, John, for that great insight. Think big, take it one day at a time and each day do the most important thing.

Withstanding Life’s Challenges

2011-12-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

In the white paper on resilience I co-authored with J. Stephen Lindsey, http://www.box.net/s/oakto94omx3xumvv7aqm, Steve and I talk about specific thing you can do to build your resilience. Resilience is your ability to withstand life’s challenges, to “perform in the storm” as performance researcher Jim Loehr says. In today’s world, we face constant challenge, constant change, greater demands and more time pressures. It’s so easy to get knocked off center, to feel stressed and pressured all the time.

Building our resilience builds our ability to withstand this pressure, to thrive in a challenging environment. The secret to resilience is the stress-recovery cycle—challenging ourselves and then providing a period of time to recover. Jim Loehr goes into this in more detail in this youtube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybfPNevrF00.

There are a number of ways to build from thinking positively to breaking projects into small chunks, to getting in touch with your deepest values. Many more hints and resources are listed in our white paper, “Resilience: The Key to Peak Performance. I invite you to take a look and let me know what you think.

Motivation: What Does Work?

2010-04-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I discussed the dangers of relying on rewards and punishment to motivate people. As Dan Pink (danpink.com) writes in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, rewards and punishments often produce lower performance in work that demands creativity, innovation, and independent initiative.

One of the studies Pink cites provides a clue about why. In 1949, psychology professor Harry F. Harlow crafted an experiment to study learning in primates (in this case rhesus monkeys). He created a simple puzzle which the monkeys could solve by pulling a pin out of a block of wood, undoing a hook and then pulling up a hinge. The puzzles were placed in the monkeys’ cages before the test to see what the monkeys would do. Surprisingly, they began playing with the puzzle with what looked like enjoyment until they found the solution. By the time the researchers tested them, the monkeys solved the puzzle easily and repeatedly.

Up to that time, psychologists believed there were only two forms of motivation, our biological drive and extrinsic motivators like rewards and punishments. What shocked Harlow and his associates was that when they gave the monkeys raisins as a reward for solving the puzzles they make more errors and solved the puzzle less frequently. Harlow postulated that a third motivational drive existed, which he called intrinsic motivation. In addition he noted that the introduction of the extrinsic reward, food, “served to disrupt performance.”

Fast forward to 1995 when Microsoft launched its well researched and funded electronic encyclopedia, Encarta. Who could have predicted that by 2010 it would be defunct and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by amateurs who are never paid a dime, would be the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world? Obviously the volunteers who developed and maintain Wikipedia don’t do it for the money!

Why work on a project for free? As Harlow showed, the reward is the activity itself—in its capacity to satisfy us. Pink identifies three types of intrinsic motivation that create that sense of satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is about choice. It is about doing something we enjoy, when we want to do it, choosing who we do it with and how we do it. Watch small children at play and it’s clear we’re born self directed.

Pink describes mastery as “getting better at something that matters.” We are engaged and motivated when the tasks we are given allow us to stretch (if it’s too easy we get bored), but they aren’t so tough that we give up. Just as monkeys played with the puzzle until they mastered it, we humans want to be good at something, to master something.

Purpose is “a cause greater and more enduring” than ourselves. It is the part of us that is transcendent, which feels best when we are doing something to make the world a better place.
Pink describes a number of ways to harness intrinsic motivators to boost performance. An Australian software company initiated a practice called “Fed Ex Days” for their engineers. Once a quarter employees have 24 hours to work on any project they choose. It could be a fix to an existing system or try out an entirely new idea. At the end of the 24 hours, employees gather to show what they’ve developed. Many successful new initiatives have come from this practice.

Distributing tasks among employees based on what they do well and enjoy doing taps into mastery. Another method is to give yourself (and perhaps your employees) a “flow test.” Set a timer to remind you to stop what you are doing and write down what you are doing, how you feel at that moment, and whether you are completely absorbed in your work. Do this about 40 times at random intervals for one week. Then analyze the data to determine how you could increase the number of optimal experiences (when you are absorbed in work that engages you) in your work day.

One way to find your purpose is to ask yourself a big question. Pink describes how Claire Booth Luce once told President Kennedy, “ ‘A great man is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’” Luce challenged Kennedy to find his one sentence. Our challenge is to find ours.

See Pink’s book for more ways to build intrinsic motivation in yourself, in your organization and in your children.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

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2010-04-12T07:29:00.001-07:00

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The Perils of Pay for Performance

2010-04-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

In the early 1960’s, a psychologist named Sam Glucksberg conducted an experiment testing the effects of extrinsic rewards on creativity. He divided his subjects into two groups and gave them a puzzle to solve that required identifying a new function for a common object (in this case a box with tacks in it). Half the group was told that they were being timed to determine a benchmark for how long it took to solve the puzzle. The other half was told that they would receive a cash award if they finished in the top 25% of the group and a higher cash award if they finished first. Which group do you think finished the puzzle faster?

If you guessed the group with the cash incentive, you guessed wrong. It took them an average of 3 ½ minutes longer to get the puzzle. Yes, that’s right. 3 ½ minutes longer. Why? Because extrinsic rewards tend to narrow our focus. We look toward the goal, which makes it more difficult to see the wider implications. Solving the problem in the experiment required a wide focus, an openness to new solutions.

Other psychologists have done similar studies that have tested this effect on creativity. What they have found is radically changing our idea of what motivates exceptional performance. It is not, according to Daniel Pink in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, (http://www.danpink.com/) the cash bonuses, the commissions, the high salaries, the pay for performance many companies use to incent employees. He says these types of rewards work fine if the task follows a set of guidelines or rules and is repetitive. But for creative work, for solving problems that haven’t been solved before, for dealing with complex issues where guidelines don’t work, science is showing us that rewards and punishments not only don’t work, they sometimes actually do harm by lowering performance or incenting unethical behavior.

In a second experiment cited by Pink, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini studied the effects of punishment on parents whose children attended 20 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. The closing time for the centers was 4:00 p.m. If parents were late, a teacher would have to stay with the child until the parents arrived. Gneezy and Rustichini began the study by recording the number of times parents were late picking up their children. At the end of four weeks, the researchers were allowed to charge a fine for late parents. Because a punishment had been imposed, the researchers expected the number of late parents to decrease, but to their astonishment, the opposite happened. After the fine was imposed, the number of late parents actually increased, eventually climbing to a level twice as high as the pre-fine level. What Pink concluded is that the threat of punishment crowded out the motivation parents once had to treat their children’s teacher fairly. “The fine,” he says, “shifted the parents’ decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teacher), to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.”

Pink says our organizations, for the most part, still operate under the assumption that the way to increase desirable behavior is to reward it and the way to decrease undesirable behavior is to punish it. Our pay systems are built on this foundation. But science is telling us that there’s a cost, and the cost is diminished performance, less creativity, lowered intrinsic reward, more short-term thinking, and organizations where good behavior can get crowded out and shortcuts, even cheating, are encouraged. This doesn't mean that equitable pay is unimportant. Unequal or unfair pay creates a distraction. But for creative work, extrinsic rewards often backfire.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Getting Through a Job Transition Successfully

2010-03-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

“I can’t seem to focus—it’s taking me three times as long to get anything done.” “One day I feel fine, the next I’m in a panic.” “It’s strange, the day just seems to go by and at the end of it I haven’t accomplished anything I set out to do.” “No one will hire me, I’m too old.”

A number of my clients are going through a career transition. Sometimes they are the ones making the decision, other times someone made the decision for them. What all of them have needed is a clear understanding of what happens to them emotionally when they make this kind of significant change.

Why is that important? Emotions are the drivers of our behavior. We move and act based on how we feel. Any kind of change produces all kinds of emotions, and some of those emotions make it difficult to do anything. When we enter the unknown, as we must when changing a job or a career, most people don’t know what to expect emotionally. They don’t know that there are predictable patterns of emotional states that are a natural part of the transition process. They believe they are alone, that no one else is experiencing what they are going through. Worse still, they may believe that something is wrong with them.

William Bridges (http://www.wmbridges.com/ )has written several books about the emotional stages of transition and his work has helped my clients and many others make sense of the myriad of emotions they experience as they move from the old to the new. He first distinguished the transition process (the emotional response to change) from the change process (the actual change that is triggering the emotional response) and divided the transition process into three phases: ending, chaos or the neutral zone, and new beginning.

In the ending stage of transition, one has to come to grips with the fact that with change something has to go away. People experience a sense of loss and all the emotions that go with it—denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and resignation, acceptance. In the chaos stage (Bridges now calls it the neutral zone) people have accepted that something has ended but they don’t know what the new job or career will look like. This middle period is full of ups and downs—at times it seems like there is nothing to hold onto. People are upbeat one day and depressed the next. It becomes difficult to focus as familiar markers go away. It’s sometimes hard to get up in the morning or to get motivated.

It sounds pretty miserable, doesn’t it? But there’s an upside to the chaos. It’s an incredibly creative period. The old blinders are off and people can see their situation in new ways and develop solutions that were unthinkable before. I have watched clients come up with innovative ideas for networking and marketing themselves or their businesses—things that would never have been on their radar screens under normal circumstances.

The third period is called the new beginning. This is the stage where the future starts to take shape and people can see where they are headed. It has some challenges too, as people struggle with developing the confidence that they can take on this new role. But the path is much clearer and in general the emotional roller coaster has smoothed out.

I have found four things to be of tremendous help in moving through the stages of transition. The first is to recognize that the ups and downs of the transition period are normal and usually temporary. You are not alone—and you aren’t crazy! The second is to question your negative assumptions. If you think your age is an issue, consider this. Research has shown that energy and vigor are more important than age to employers. Pay attention to what you accept about yourself and your situation as true. Is it really? Experiment with alternative, more hopeful, assumptions. Third, focus on what you do well rather than your shortcomings. Creativity is expanded in a positive frame of mind. Fourth, create a schedule or routine to replace the old one you had while working. Include satisfying and fun activities as part of the mix. Bring some things into your life you couldn’t fit in while you were working.

Understanding and working with the emotional side of change helps make positive change possible. It makes it easier to navigate the unknown.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

How to Build Your Emotional Intelligence

2010-03-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

“Emotions . . . are at the root of everything we do, the unquenchable origin of every act more complicated that a reflex. . . In all cases, emotions are humanity’s motivator and its omnipresent guide.”

--Thomas Lewis,MD, Fari Amini, MD and Richard Lannon, MD, A General Theory of Love

If you want to motivate people to give you their best every day and inspire them to keep moving forward despite the inevitable obstacles that get in the way of achieving a goal, you have to know how to touch them on an emotional level. That requires emotional intelligence, the capacity to identify and understand one’s own and others emotions, and to manage oneself in relationships. There is a plethora of information on emotional intelligence, but when it comes to developing emotional intelligence, the material that appeals most to me comes from Learning in Action Technologies, www.learninginaction.com, a Seattle-based company specializing in EQ related assessments, workshops, teleclasses, and coaching.

Learning in Action focuses on the basic building blocks of emotional intelligence. The competencies and skills Daniel Goleman and others use to predict leadership performance flow from these capacities. If you want to improve your ability to use your emotions intelligently, it makes sense to work on these foundational capacities first. These are:

Self Reflection is the ability to recognize your own experience—your thoughts, feelings, wants, bodily sensations and actions. Self reflection is the capacity to observe yourself in the moment and to use your internal experience to inform what you do. Much of our internal experience is so automatic that we remain unconscious of it. As we build our capacity to observe our own reactions to a situation, we can consciously choose how to act instead of responding automatically (and often ineffectively).

Self Regulation and Self Soothing is the capacity to calm ourselves when we experience tension and to soothe ourselves when we experience emotional pain. By calming ourselves in healthy ways, we clear our brains so we can assess the situation more accurately, identify more possibilities for action, and choose more wisely. With this capacity, we are able to regain a sense of balance on our own, without requiring others to change.

Empathy is the ability to recognize what someone else is experiencing, to see something from their perspective, and to accept that perspective even if you don’t agree with it. It is being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes. Empathy is both the ability to accurately assess what someone else is feeling and to feel for them—to care about their experience.

Learning in Action has developed an assessment to measure these capacities, the EQ in Action Profile, and a handbook of practices for strengthening each area. The EQ in Action Profile uses videotaped scenarios to measure how you respond to stressful situations rather than self report or a 360 assessment. The handbook offers 150 suggestions for strengthening your EQ fitness, and is available to individuals who have taken the assessment.

Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

What Every Leader Should Know About How Teams Work

2010-02-16T07:38:00.000-08:00

In the mid-1990’s, researcher and business consultant Marcial Losada built a board room where corporate teams met to conduct typical meetings—planning and strategy sessions, etc. But there was a twist. The room was equipped with one-way mirrors where Losada and his assistants tracked every behavior that occurred in those meetings. As a result, Losada was able to build a mathematical model that delineates the factors that create a high performing vs. a low performing team with unusual precision.

Losada used three criteria to determine the performance level of the teams he was studying: profitability, customer satisfaction and evaluations by peers, superiors and subordinates. Using these indicators, Losada found that 25% of the teams he studied were high performing, 30% were low performing and the remainder had mixed success.

Losada plotted the moment by moment data he had collected on all the teams, and when he compared the high performing and low performing teams, there were striking differences. First, the high performing teams had a much higher percentage of positive statements to negative statements—or positivity ratio—than the low performing teams. High performing teams had a positivity ratio of 6:1, compared to below 1:1 for low performing teams. Mixed performance teams had a positivity ratio of around 2:1. In addition, high performing team members connected to each other more frequently, they were attuned to each others’ mood and thoughts, than the other two teams. High performing teams balanced advocacy (defending your point of view) and inquiry (asking questions) and the number of statements that were self focused or other focused. The low performing teams asked almost no questions and showed very little outward focus and had much lower levels of connectivity.

What was even more telling is that teams that maintained a positivity ratio of at least 3:1 (three positive statements for every one negative statement) were able to sustain the characteristics of high performance and top level results over long periods of time. They continued to flourish even in difficult times. They remained open to new ideas, they were flexible and creative, and they were resilient in tough times. The results were very different for the other types of teams. They floundered under pressure. The mixed success teams were able to be creative and open, but when faced with difficult challenges they tended to regress to a lower level of functioning—they became inflexible and stuck in a rut. Team members stopped asking questions and focused on defending their positions. The low performing teams spiraled downward to a stalemate, where nothing got done.

What every team leader needs to know is that there is a tipping point, a precise point where teams head in different directions—either toward openness, flexibility, creativity, resilience and success, or toward closed, internal thinking, stalemate and failure. A tipping point is the point at which an entity changes dramatically, like ice changing to water at precisely 32 0F. Losada calculated that the tipping point for teams is a positivity ratio of 3:1. Any positivity ratio between 3:1 and 11:1 will produce the characteristics of a high performing, self correcting team. Below that ratio and teams will flounder, especially in tough times.

There is more about Losada’s research in Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson, www.positivityratio.com .

Plum Cluverius is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

The Leader's Toolkit: Situational Leadership

2010-02-03T08:33:00.000-08:00

One of the questions my clients ask most frequently is how to develop their people more effectively. Often they ask it because they are stuck solving problems for employees for the better part of the work day—and then are forced to work extra hours to get their own work done. I always recommend the Situational Leadership Model, a tool I have shared with leaders for over 30 years. Clients tell me it is the most practical model they ever learned.

Developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the late 1960’s, Situational Leadership provides a roadmap for effective employee development, delegation and performance management. It identifies two key leadership behaviors, giving direction and providing emotional support, which followers need in varying amounts if they are to successfully learn or complete a task. It then demonstrates how the two leader behaviors are combined to create a variety of leadership styles. What makes the model so practical is that it shows leaders when to use the different styles for maximum impact. If, for example, you have an employee who turns in sloppy work that you have to review and correct before it goes out, the model will help you diagnose the leader behaviors you are currently using that aren’t working and identify the leader behaviors that will probably be more effective.

The key to successful diagnosis is to identify what leader behaviors the follower needs in order to be productive. This is determined by identifying the follower’s development or readiness level—that is, how competent (do they have the requisite knowledge and skills) and committed (are they confident they can be successful and do they think the task is important) the follower is. Blanchard labeled four development or readiness levels: the eager beginner (little knowledge and skills but some level of commitment), the disillusioned learner (some knowledge and skills but somewhat discouraged or uninterested), the capable, but cautious performer (significant knowledge and skills but lacks confidence or commitment) and the self reliant achiever (high levels of competence and commitment). Click here for images of the model.

Each of these four development levels requires different leader behavior. The eager beginner needs a lot of clear direction, the disillusioned learner needs direction and emotional support. The capable, but cautious performer (often an underachiever) frequently gets, but does not need, a lot of direction. Instead, they require supportive leader behavior to determine what will help them recognize the importance of the task or develop more confidence in themselves. The self reliant achiever needs little direction or support from the leader.

Strong leaders match their leadership styles to the needs of the follower they are trying to influence. Dysfunctional leadership occurs when leaders use more directive or supportive behavior than needed (overleading) or less directive or supportive behavior than needed (underleading).

Going back to our employee who turns in the sloppy work, the leader should first assess—either alone or by talking with the employee—if the problem is a lack of skill, a lack of confidence or commitment, or both. If the problem is a lack of skill, the leader needs to give clearer direction, guidance and feedback. If the problem is a lack of confidence or commitment, the leader needs to give more emotional support by asking questions, giving praise and encouragement, and explaining how the task fits into the big picture.

To learn more about how this works and for a free diagnostic tool, contact Plum at www.vedereconsulting.com or go to the source: Paul Hersey at or Ken Blanchard.

What Is Your Positivity Ratio

2010-01-19T07:49:00.000-08:00

Have you ever gotten up in the morning and things just seemed to go wrong from the time you woke up until you went to bed? It’s almost like one thing cascades into another making you more and more frustrated and irritable. You’re drowning in a sea of negativity.

You don’t have to live this way, says psychologist and researcher Barbara Fredrickson, PhD. You can change your mood, and when you do, you change your life. She’s done the research to prove it. For years, Fredrickson has investigated the value of positive emotions—joy, serenity, gratitude, curiosity, amusement, etc. in both controlled laboratory experiments and in field studies. She’s measured the effects of positive emotions on the way people think and catalogued their impact on people’s skills, traits and well being. What she’s found is that positive emotions have a purpose beyond just feeling good for a moment. Positive emotions expand our ability to respond to daily crises and problems with creativity and resilience. Basically she says that fear closes down our minds and hearts, it makes us dumber and less able to respond to a crisis. Positive emotions open them, so that we see our problems more clearly, and are able to make more creative and nourishing choices about what to do next.

In addition, the more we experience positive emotions, the more we change and grow, becoming better people and developing the tools we need to make a better life. That is, over the long term, we become more satisfied and fulfilled.

A fascinating part of Fredrickson’s work is the positivity ratio, the number of positive emotions compared to the number of negative emotions we experience each day. If our positivity ratio is 3:1 (3 positive emotions to one negative emotion), we reach a tipping point where we receive all the nourishing benefits of positive thinking. Below that ratio, we tend to descend into negativity. Most of us have a positivity ratio of 2:1 or worse. (If you want to find yours, you can take a free quiz at www.positivityratio.com).

We can improve the ratio by experimenting with ways to inject positivity into our days. And this isn’t something you can fake. In fact, you can pressure yourself to be positive and that just adds to the negativity! Instead, look for sources of beauty and pleasure. Look for small opportunities to engage in nourishing activities. Notice your negative interpretations of events and find a more positive perspective. There are a number of tools on Fredrickson’s website. Take advantage, and let yourself flourish.

Develop a Healthy Relationship with Your Money

2010-01-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

We all have a relationship with money. We either care for it, nurture it or we abuse it. Many of us are anxious about our finances. It’s a relationship we can’t escape—and it’s complicated, if not sometimes dysfunctional.

So what constitutes a healthy relationship with money? Interestingly, it’s not about having a lot. Research indicates that more money increases happiness when people move from poverty to the middle class, but falls off after that. Real satisfaction with money comes when we spend, save and acquire money in a way that is consistent with our deepest, most fundamental desires and values. It happens when we are able to be grateful for what we have, when we learn to be satisfied now rather than believing happiness will come when we move to a bigger house or buy the latest gadget. It comes from taking control of our finances instead of letting them control us.

This kind of satisfaction and gratitude is hard to sustain because our relationship with money is influenced by attitudes about money, our money “scripts,” that we have developed over many years. Money scripts are patterns of thought about money that are so habitual we are usually completely unaware of them. We develop our scripts from the way our parents dealt with money, cultural messages, and our own interpretations of events in our lives. One woman who always wore hand-me-downs is now determined to have “the best of everything.” A colleague whose parents taught him that being successful meant earning lots of money measures his success by how much money he makes. A woman learned from her parents that “the money will come when you need it,” used a credit card when she couldn’t afford something until she was in deep financial trouble. And all of us are bombarded by a culture that tells us every day that what we have and who we are is not enough.

The first step in developing a healthy relationship to money is to do some soul searching, to reflect deeply on what is most important to you. The second step is to identify the unconscious money scripts that create dysfunction in your relationship with money. The third step is to create healthier beliefs that will enable you to do the financial research and take grounded action that will move you toward a relationship with money that serves your deepest self. These three steps are vital because without them, your unconscious patterns will repeat themselves no matter how much planning you do.