It takes time, patience, and consistent effort to achieve the results you want.
This is where micro actions come in.
The culmination of leadership experience and exposure simplified,
including some guidelines to practice leadership efforts.
One of the most underrated and underestimated leadership responsibilities relates to the most frequent interactions with your team: team meetings, 1-on-1 meetings, and appraisal meetings.
I refer to it as Operational Leadership.
How the leader's bold & imaginative behaviour kills team engagement, commitment & ownership, and innovation & new ideas creation
There are many leadership values and abilities, but Authenticity, Integrity & Empathy form the Triple Crown of Modern Leadership.
Leadership coaching & development has evolved from pseudo-psychology to individual programs co-created with the client and the coachee, based on real-world industry experience of the coach, grounded in science with a focus on change, transformation, and behavioural impact, supported by data, leading to implementable actions and solutions.
Implementation intentions are not magic, but with a goal striving strategy you improve your chances to reach your goal.
Ask yourself:
When you are an empathic person and you want to leave a legacy
would you rather rely on a careful attitude
or would you embrace your youthful audacity and go for it?
Balcony or Dancefloor? Strike a leadership balance between the big picture and high quality relationships for team member performance and satisfaction
Anecdotes are good, data is better. Erik de Haan has published his review of quantitative research on the effectiveness of coaching.
Don't take your success for granted, collect and analyse independent evidence, and use the power of anticipation
Motivation is the motor of our actions. From the moment our alarm wakes us up in the morning until we turn off the light to sleep in the evening.
Without motivation, we wouldn’t go too far. But what is behind the term “motivation”, and how does it work?
My research showed that it is very hard to create a psychologically safe team climate for leaders who suffer from an overdose of psychopathic personality traits or hang around too long on the dark side of narcissism; mainly due to a lack of empathy. But fortunately, most of us have more than enough empathic capacity to create a psychologically safe team climate.
But how do you know if you can? And to which extent?
Create your own Road Map to Psychological Safety Excellence.
The comfort zone. A recurring theme in most of my coaching programs. In popular literature, it is considered the starting point for personal growth, before you enter your fear zone, learning zone and finally growth zone. I believe you should strive to be in a constant state of comfort, avoiding the fear zone while embracing learning and growth in a comfortable way.
Being comfortable means that you aware and mindful of the situations you may face, both unexpectedly and as expected. That you are aware of your strengths and weaknesses and feel comfortable with them, that you truly know your self. The benefit of such a state of mind, is that you can skip the fear zone and be constantly ready to learn and grow - which reinforces your comfort zone and reduces the chance of entering the fear zone significantly.
However there is one pitfall to watch out for: climb Mount Stupid with overconfidence and fall of the cliff into the Valley of Despair.
The workplace can be tough at times. You are misunderstood, you wish people could see your potential, you are eager to move up the corporate ladder, but you feel stuck. Stuck in your daily or weekly to-do lists. Your project that faces obstacles, hurdles and delays.
If you could only talk to an outsider, who is not part of your daily office surroundings. Someone who supports you and does not ask you to justify who you are and what your motivation is. Someone who is your private and personal advisor, someone who only cares about you, someone who does not have anything other on his agenda than to make you become better and happier in your job.
And that's me. And this is what I do for you to realise your potential.
Have you ever noticed the emotions involved when you want to change something or you are going through a change? Joy or sadness, anger or fear, trust or distrust, surprise or anticipation? These are our primitive emotions, which are hard-wired responses in all of us and correspond to a distinct and dedicated neurological circuit. Being hardwired, basic emotions (or ‘affect programs’) are innate and universal, automatic, and fast, and trigger behaviour with a high survival value.
Change evokes emotions and as you may have experienced yourself in your business life, most of the time change evokes fear and distrust, leading to frustration and physical responses such a stress. It makes you feel uncomfortable and you would probably start finding ways to relieve yourself from stress as it feels unpleasant and unwanted.
But would it be worthwhile to embrace this stress and dig deeper into what actually stresses you or others out?
Marshall Goldsmith’s highly successful approach to executive development and coaching includes a strong emphasis on the involvement of stakeholders, implementation of change and follow-through to measure growth in leadership effectiveness.
In the end, the only thing that counts is leadership growth i.e. leadership (behavior) effectiveness on the job as perceived by stakeholders. As Marshall puts it: "Leadership Change and Coaching are simple but not easy!"
Stakeholder Centered Coaching developed by Marshall Goldsmith is a highly effective, transparent, structured and time efficient process.
You want change in your life, in your career, in your behaviour. But it is hard and every time when you think you are ready for the change, something pulls you back. Triggers such as a situation, certain circumstances, old habits, feelings. I am sure you have said it yourself: Oh, it’s the story of my life…
Thoroughly asking yourself why you actually end up not doing what you really want and stand for, but remaining stuck in old habits, can change the story of your life.
So how do you change the story of your life?
In January, I attended a great 2 day workshop about Action Science at Oxford University/Saïd Business School by Dr. Bob Putnam from Harvard Business School (quite some name-dropping here... apologies).
Bob taught us that one of the barriers to success, is that members of an organisation are unable to engage in an open, fact-based inquiry into potentially threatening issues.
Many people seem to face some alignment issues between 'what I responded' and 'what did I think/feel', as well as between 'what she said' and 'what I think/felt she said'. Misinterpretations, wrong judgments, incomplete data - it all leads to unintended consequences or hot reactions.
How to fix this and what can we learn from Bomb Science - which is not Rocket Science. In fact Rocket Science seems to be easier to understand.
- only for clients -
I hear more and more people thinking of a career change, but not that many people make the change they want so much. It is not easy and I speak from experience. Three years ago I took the decision to quit my corporate career after 17 years as it did not fulfill me anymore, but also because I knew that if I waited longer, it would be very hard to become successful in a new profession.
Recently, I came across an older article (1992) of Carole Kanchier, who wrote her Phd dissertation with the title Dare to Change your Job and your Life and she identified 7 stages of career change, based on interviews with thousands of women and men. When I read it and compared my career change process, I thought she is totally right.
In this essay I want to address whether there is an increase in narcissistic behaviour and entitlement of Generation Y (millennial) born between 1980 and 1994, and what the underlying causes for such a possible rise could be, in particular with respect to parenting and institutional factors.
Further, I will discuss how domination of narcissistic behaviour and sense of entitlement could unfold in the workplace in a worst-case scenario, and how companies could respond to an increase in narcissistic behaviour and a strong sense of entitlement of Generation Y.
How do you treat people? How are you treated and how does it motivate or demotivate you? Do you feel people are authentic and behaving appropriately? What does it tell you about you? What can you learn? Do you share the same values? Do you feel trusted and respected? Does the team culture and vibe lead to performance?
Observation helps you to understand why people trust each other and why people don’t. It helps you understanding how high quality relationships are built and maintained, and how conflicts arise. Observing yourself and others helps you in understanding team dynamics such as joy, excitement, but also tension and frustration. Observation teaches you about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as well as the potential of people.
Observation starts with yourself. Just like leadership: it is inside of you. And you can learn it: for free!
Everybody talks about leaders and leadership. But what about teamship?
The larger the teams, the larger the complexity is of achieving the same goal. Collective action occurs when a number of people work together to achieve some common goal.
I believe that company culture and performance depend largely on group dynamics and in particular if collective action can be achieved. IF it can be achieved at all. Because quite often, group members do not seem to be willing to achieve the same goal. We speak about a collective action problem.
Two important ingredients for successful organisations: a slightly narcissistic CEO and psychological safety within the organisation. But what happens when a very narcissistic CEO turns in to a Big Bad Wolf and starts treating human beings as objects? Try maintaining psychological safety in the team, which sounds like Little Red Cap giving feedback to the Big Bad Wolf, dressed up as her grandmother, and she about the size of his mouth. It is not working out very well.
So, to which extent can they coexist? What needs to be in place to make sure that the Wolf keeps his charm, but does not eat Little Red Cap? How can Little Red Cap believe that she can provide a reality check to the Wolf without being eaten?
In this essay, I will address the importance of both psychological safety and CEO narcissism and I will discuss possible interventions to prevent the coexistence of these two potential opposites of going over the tipping point from constructive narcissism toward reactive and destructive narcissism.
How do you feel when you walk the streets down town, full with traffic, people rushing, noise everywhere, tall buildings blocking the sunlight?How do you feel when you are hiking in the mountains, smelling alpine flowers, pine trees, being surrounded by trees, lakes, cows and perhaps a few deer or ibexes?
I am pretty certain that you feel a lot better in the mountains. Nature has a healing effect and makes you feel better. Sure, a short city trip may fill you with energy, but a longer holiday surrounded by nature, being it the beach and ocean or the mountains and forests recharges your batteries.
How come?
Is it possible to change the mindset of a large organisation, such as a multinational?
The question is, whether it is possible to scale the principles of Action Science to a larger group, such as an organisation, to change its mindset and thereby improving the actions for the intended outcomes. To understand the possibility, I will reflect on the impact of group dynamics and circumstantial influences on the application of Action Science to a larger group.
These dynamics and influences – such as trust, motivation, cultural differences, distances between entities, and constant change – impact group behaviour and therefore the success rate of a collective learning intervention to achieve a mindset change, on individual level and various size levels of an organisation.
My reflection.
Whether you meet with your team members or you meet with your team leader, annual appraisal meetings will have a lasting impact in particular on the team member’s motivation and future performance.
How do you make sure that the impact is constructive, drives intrinsic motivation and leads to a better cooperation that before?
Learning from failures is very important for leaders and managers to increase their capacity to cope with crisis events, by learning from the experience of previous crises. Just as well for decreasing subsequent accident and incident rates for decreasing an organization’s risk of failure, for enhancing organizational reliability, and for achieving various organizational outcomes such as service quality, adaptability, innovativeness, and productivity.
Didn’t Einstein state that Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results? (you will find the answer at the end of this article).
But how can organisations and teams learn from failures? What are the conditions to make it work best?
Have you have ever told your team to get on with it and deliver what was agreed? I am pretty sure you have. It is completely normal. And it happens over and over again. Unfortunately, your team will come up with excuses and adopt a defensive approach, to explain to you why they did not perform.
How can you evolve from managing to coaching, when your team member does not have the right mindset, but does have the competencies to do the task?
Managers do what needs to be done within the boundaries set by the organization. Leaders extend the boundaries of the organization. Extending the boundaries means that leaders need to make people feel comfortable and able to take that step.
As a result of this demand for influencing others and the increased responsibility of the position, leaders experience a form of stress called power stress. In addition, to be effective as a leader requires the regular exercise of self-control: placing the good of the organisation above personal impulses and needs. This is stressful too.
Especially in sports the adagium Never Change a Winning Team is what coaches live by. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? is probably what you have heard at work.
But does it make sense to leave things as they are when you are successful? Is your magic formula forever creating top-results? What happens if your successful product becomes obsolete and you have little room to change course, because all your processes have been set up for that one product?
Let’s have a look at 3 examples showing the importance of changing a winning team.
Have you ever wondered what is going on when your successful pilot project does not receive implementation approval? Or why your performance does not land that promotion?
Decoding power plays and political dynamics provides us with a working tool with which we can analyze organizational politics and orient our action in a politicized way.
In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. Markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight.
Successful companies consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products.
And you, as the CEO or Chief Innovation of a longstanding company, which perhaps still is an industry leader, needs to catch up with all the innovations happening. Before the disruption kicks in hard and you need to explain the shareholders why you had a kodak moment.
But is your organization actually designed for integrating start-ups?
In 1997, Christopher Wallace presented his step-by-step guide to achieving success in business. The same year when he famously proclaimed that mo’ money would lead to mo’ problems. It was also the year he died.