Archive for the ‘Leadership Skills’ Category

Do you hate giving feedback?

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

I find it fascinating to notice themes emerging from individual and totally separate coaching clients. Over the last week a common theme has been giving feedback.

It seems that many of us dislike giving feedback even more than we dislike receiving it, so what is it that prevents us from giving honest and constructive comments?

Here are some of the fears that clients have shared with me:

  • Fear of upsetting the other person
  • Fear of creating an atmosphere
  • Fear of retaliation
  • Fear of destroying a relationship
  • Fear of losing control

When communicated in the right way, giving constructive feedback is a powerful way of improving relationships, performance and productivity.

Here are some top tips:

  • Recognise your reasons for giving feedback, and share if appropriate
  • Be clear on what outcome you want as a result of giving feedback, i.e. change in behaviour, motivation, specific results.
  • Balance your feedback with positive as well as constructive comments
  • Check out any assumptions you may have i.e. don’t try to prove that you’re right
  • Ensure that you challenge a person’s behaviour, not their identity
  • Avoid blaming, labelling or generalising i.e. ‘you always’ or ‘you never’
  • Be specific when delivering positive as well as negative feedback
  • Avoid using the word ‘but’ after giving positive feedback, this negates the position

Ensure that your feedback is

  • Legal – you have the right or agreement to deliver the feedback
  • Decent – respects the individual
  • Truthful – tell the simple truth
  • Honest – based on the facts, complete and unembellished

End the conversation on a positive note. And remember, some feedback is better than no feedback

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Handling Conflict, Leadership Skills, Personal Impact | No Comments »

Are your thoughts sabotaging your success?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

I love coaching. It’s such a privilege to be a witness to my client’s world and their thoughts. I find it fascinating just how much our feelings and therefore our actions are driven by our thoughts and how we make sense of situations around us. We are constantly thinking, analysing and judging. We are mulling over what has happened in the past, or thinking about the days/weeks/months ahead and our hopes and fears for what might happen.

I was working with a client recently (let’s call her Jill) who was feeling overwhelmed. She had been recently promoted, and with the promotion came increased responsibilities. Although she was more than capable of dealing with her new role, her thoughts were full of doubt. Had she taken on too much? What if she couldn’t deliver? What if she made a wrong decision?

The more she was focusing on the ‘What ifs’ and how it could all go pear-shaped, the more anxious she felt and so she retreated from taking action. As I reflected this back to her, Jill could see how her thoughts were impacting on her behaviour, and therefore her results. I helped Jill to create some fun strategies so that she could monitor her feelings and when necessary, switch to positive and more empowering thoughts. It has taken a few weeks to adopt some new habits, but the results have been worth the effort. Jill is now more confident in her new role, she’s happy to use the resources around her and is ready to accept that making ‘wrong’ decisions will be part of the learning process.

Are your thoughts helping or hindering you?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Career Direction, Leadership Skills, Personal Impact, Stress Management | No Comments »

The fears behind our behaviour

Monday, December 10th, 2012

Last week I was on a course, gaining a more in depth knowledge about FIRO theory.

F.I.R.O stands for Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation – in other words, understanding the deep-seated way in which we relate to other people. This theory explores how our behaviour impacts on those around us, how we act in response to how we think and feel about ourselves – and how we behave based on how we think others see us.

It’s a fascinating theory and even after all these years of coaching, and my own self exploration and self development, I gained further understanding of what is driving my behaviour.  It was interesting to uncover that my fear about making the ‘wrong’ decision is down to my fear of being humiliated. What I know now is that this fear comes from many years ago, and isn’t relevant any more – quite a powerful lesson for me.

Our behaviour is underpinned by our feelings, and fears of being ignored, humiliated or rejected.

Think about something you keep putting off, and the ‘fear’ associated with that. Unless it’s obviously life threatening, I bet you can see which of the three fears above is most relevant.

“So vital is an awareness of THE SELF that the leader who is unaware of their own blind spots or how they impact on others is like to become a walking disaster in the workplace, a leader who may lead their ‘troops’ over the cliff face” (McCarthy & Ganavan 1999)

If you want to find out more about FIRO theory, just drop me a line.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Interpersonal Skills, Leadership Skills, Personal Impact | No Comments »

Are you hiding your ‘true self’ in meetings?

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

There has been a theme with some of my clients recently around a lack of confidence with senior people in their organisation. This is having a negative effect on their personal impact and influencing skills, and they are not adding the value that they could be adding if they felt more confident.

How come we can be confident with our team members or clients, yet when we step into the boardroom with our peers, our confidence fades? What is it that stops you from speaking up, asking questions, sharing your ideas? What conversations are you having in your mind that prevents you from adding value to the discussion?

The common cause is often a fear of some sort. It’s usually a deep seated fear that you are not even aware of until you bring it out into the open and name it. Fear of rejection, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of taking up too much air time and a fear that your specialist subject isn’t as important as the next person's. Fears are driven and fed by our long held beliefs, in fact we have had them for so long we can’t remember where they came from or if they are still relevant. Once you start to unpick where your beliefs originated and explore whether they are still valid (which they rarely are), you can choose to let them go and find more empowering beliefs.

You can free up your mind to focus on adding value to the discussion, and show the 'real you' to your peers and senior leadership team.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Leadership Skills, Personal Impact | No Comments »

Do you suffer from procrastination?

Friday, May 27th, 2011

"When I get the feeling to do something, I lie down until the feeling goes away"

We’re all guilty of it, and know we’re doing it, so just why do we put things off?  When you finally decide to start that project you know has to be done, tidying up your desk, or making a coffee suddenly become quite appealing.

There are many reasons why we delay doing the important but not urgent stuff:

  • The project is so big you don’t know where to start.
  • The project isn’t interesting.
  • You have too long to do the task.
  • You don’t like the task you need to do.

We put off the majority of important tasks because they are too overwhelming. They are too complex or time consuming for us to handle.

Swiss Cheese Technique

Alan Lakein suggests the Swiss Cheese Technique.

  • Pick a small task related to the main project & do it.
  • Follow this task with another small, easy & instant task & do it.

This process is dubbed as poking holes in the cheese. Eventually the cheese gets filled with holes, you get more and more involved in the project and it becomes much easier.

Don’t try and bite the same hole out of the cheese twice. If you tried one task and it didn’t lead to involvement, just try another task. Use the same technique for unpleasant tasks – do little 5 minute tasks then do something else.

Eat the ugly frog first!

Mark Twain said that, suppose tomorrow morning the first that you do, is catch a live frog, stuff it into your mouth, munch it down and swallow it all up. Once you did that, the day can’t get much worse now can it?

Therefore every morning, find the ugliest most repulsive task that you have on your to-do list (i.e. your frog) and knock that off before getting on to doing anything else. Once you’ve got that done, the rest of the day when you’re doing the easy tasks would seem like relishing your favourite dessert.

Brian Tracy, author of ‘Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time’, takes the analogy further:

  • If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.
  • When you’ve got two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.
  • You cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one.
  • How do you eat your biggest, ugliest frog? The answer is: “One bite at a time.” i.e. you break it down into specific step by step activities and then start on the first one.
  • You should never be distracted by a tadpole when a big frog is sitting there waiting to be eaten.

Hungry?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Leadership Skills, Time Management | No Comments »

Are you putting of making a big decision?

Friday, May 27th, 2011

We make decisions every day. What to wear, which route to take, how to spend our money. The smaller decisions are relatively easy because you can probably cope with the result of making the wrong decision. But what about the bigger decisions?

What stops us from making decisions? In most cases it's the fear of getting it wrong.

'Fear' is expecting something unpleasant to happen in the future, based on the experience of something that happened in the past.

Do you remember the last 'bad' or 'wrong' decision you made? How did you manage with the fallout, the embarrassment, picking up the pieces?

The unconscious fear behind making a big decision, more often than not, is whether we can cope if we make the 'wrong decision'.

Before you make a big decision, consider whether you can handle it if it's the wrong decision. A good way of helping you to have more faith in your decision making is to determine what your style is. What's working and what's not?

Review your most recent 'good' decisions. How did you make the decision? What was your decision making strategy? Was it based on gut instinct, how it would affect other people, or was it based on fact, rationale and research. Or maybe a mixture?

I have found it useful to make a list of all the good decisions I've made and how I made them, then a list of the poor decisions I made – and how I made them. It's interesting to see a theme emerging!

My natural style is to follow my gut instinct, my emotions. I decide whether I like someone and gather personal recommendations. Yet often I forget to gather solid facts and figures and do the research. Now that I'm aware of where I've been going wrong, I know that it's important for me to use my logical and rationale side, as well as my emotional side.

Look on the bright side, when you make a wrong decision, at least you can learn from the experience. If you choose to of course.

"Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions." Anon
 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Leadership Skills, Personal Impact | No Comments »

Engaging for the future?

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

As a business owner or business leader, wouldn’t your life be easier – and your company more successful – if your staff were as motivated as you, performing to the highest level, always prepared to go the extra mile and committed to your organisation?

If this describes your work force, then you already have good employee engagement, and yet a recent report  commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, found that only a third of UK employees are actively engaged in their jobs.

The MacLeod Report, published in July 2009, sent a clear message to the UK plc last summer, that good employee engagement is vital for organisational success and is even more crucial in the current economic climate.

But does Employee Engagement really matter? Research indicates that the benefits of increased employee engagement include better financial performance, increased innovation, more employees advocating their organisation, reduced absenteeism/turnover and higher employee well-being. Financially it makes a lot of sense.

We can see that it is important for success, but just how do you engage your employees? The report found that some key drivers for engagement are personal values matching organisational values, meaningful work, a sense of community, valued performance and individual opinions listened to and valued.

At a one day conference, ‘Engaging for the Future’, the authors of the MacLeod report, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke shared their ideas and facilitated group discussions to explore the behavioural challenges associated with employee engagement. Many business owners and leaders are aware of the need for employee engagement, and yet there appear to be barriers stopping them from getting the employee commitment they need for success.

Through group discussion at the conference, we found that the key obstacles were lack of communication (across the organisation), leadership skills, employee/line manager ownership and the current climate.

Many leaders fail to engage their staff when their natural style is systematic and delivery focused. Leaders generally like to take charge, get results; they are practical, rational and efficient. This style of leadership may get the results but this could be at the expense of the individual if people’s feelings are neglected, if employees don’t feel valued or empowered. There is a well known saying that ‘employees join an organisation, but they leave their bosses.’

As an experienced Executive Coach, it is obvious to me that the success of a business lies within the people, and if you look after your leadership team, develop and hone their leadership and people skills, they will be better equipped to motivate and engage your employees, contributing to a more successful organisation.

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Leadership Skills | No Comments »

Win Win Conversations

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

How often do you take on tasks or accept invitations that you haven't got time for (or don't want) because you don't want to upset someone by saying No?

How often do you hold back from saying what you really want to say because you don't want to appear rude or aggressive?
How much time and energy do you spend worrying about how to get out of things you shouldn't have agreed to in the first place, or drumming up the courage to say you're not happy?

We often confuse being assertive with being pushy or arrogant, when in fact to be assertive means 'to behave in a confident way in which you are quick to express your opinions and feelings'.

Some dictionaries define assertiveness as being aggressive, which is why I like to call it: 'Win/Win Conversations'
For me, assertiveness is the ability to say what you think or feel, or to say what you need, without upsetting the other person. It means saying what you want to say with confidence, with respect for yourself and respect for the other person.
It's about having Win/Win Conversations.

So if this means changing your behaviour – and a habit of a lifetime – is it worth it?
I think there are many benefits. When you adopt a win/win approach you will:

 

  • Handle conflict more easily
  • Feel more in control
  • Be treated with respect
  • Make better use of your time
  • Be trusted by others
  • Tackle problems head on
  • Be perceived as professional
  • Reduce your levels of anxiety and stress.
  • Feel more confident
  • Have higher self esteem

 

Convinced?

Once you understand what's stopping you from being assertive, then you can start to move forward and adopt a more healthy and resourceful behaviour. Although assertiveness (as opposed to being aggressive or passive) is often seen as a personality trait, it is in fact a skill or technique that any person can learn or use.
 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Leadership Skills, Personal Impact | No Comments »