Cultivating Your Personal Resilience

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Mary Stacey

Written by: Mary Stacey, Context Consulting

In today’s ‘always on’ environment, leaders experience pressure, information overload and constant distraction. Over time this sabotages many things, from their wellness to their ability to be personally resilient: present and productive during turbulence. Perhaps its because of this that we’re hearing a lot about resilience these days.

Resilient people are more healthy, hopeful, optimistic, and positive, able to learn and adapt more quickly, turn adversity into a growth experience, and flourish in times of change. Its easy to see why they can be effective leaders.

The Impact of Resilient Leaders
Resilient leaders stand out. They boost their team’s performance. They exude spaciousness that allows others to open up and take risks, making it possible to accommodate diverse perspectives and needs. Their emotional self-regulation helps the team work through conflict creatively rather than become polarized. They contribute their resilience to pivotal team conversations where collaboration and collective intelligence are essential, creating a climate that is less reactive and more responsive. Their teams spend less time fire-fighting and more time being proactive.

Google has found that resilient leaders create the most important dimension of team success: a climate of psychological safety. In contrast, non-resilient leaders who are reactive and emotionally off-balance create a climate of threat, triggering the brain’s shut-down fight-flight-freeze response. Threat undermines a team’s ability to form trust relationships, stay goal-focused during uncertainty, and bring their diversity to solve complex problems—all essential elements of collaboration.

Teams of Resilient Leaders
Teams of resilient leaders achieve exponential benefits. Their psychologically safe environment has coherence, things make sense and flow more easily. The team experiences high energy and continuously renews its sense of purpose. Conversations are open and vulnerable, helping the team access greater capacity to lead complex change. At peak performance, the team is collaboratively resilient, able to quickly improvise and adapt in ongoing turbulence.

Building Collaborative Resilience
Here are some ideas for developing your personal resilience and turning it into a leadership act that supports collaboration.

1. Cultivate your personal resilience
A recent Harvard Business Review study demonstrated that even ten minutes of daily mindfulness practice produces improvement in resilience, the capacity for collaboration, and the ability to lead in complex conditions.

Developing a personal practice (journal writing, breathing for relaxation, embodiment exercises) will help you to remain present, emotionally self-regulated, and capable of performing at your best. Over time you’ll spend less time in threat response and be better able to thrive in uncertainty.

2. Turn your resilience into a leadership act
You can translate your personal resilience into a leadership act by modeling presence: the ability to focus on the current moment, be open to diverse perspectives, listen and reflect. When others see that your presence combines with the performance level you are able to maintain, you will be demonstrating how they, too, might contribute to collaborative resilience in turbulent times.

3. Facilitate collaborative resilience in your team
Begin your meetings with a check in. Combine the HBR study’s ‘mindful minute’ with a round-table response to a question as simple as ‘How are you?” This allows team members to settle in, re-connect with themselves, choose their quality of attention, and build trust with others before turning to the issue at hand.

Be aware that your team members’ brains are constantly evaluating what you say and do in relation to threat. Design your meetings and pivotal conversations to maximize creative conflict and minimize threat. You’ll know when you’re in the zone: your team will experience a surge of energy and a renewed sense of purpose. They’ll anticipate disruption with confidence and navigate it with greater ease.

I introduce these strategies, along with many others, during Leading with Personal Resilience, part of the Collaborative Leadership Essentials at the Kingbridge Conference Centre.

References:
One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness (Hougaard, Carter, and Coutts, 2015)

How to Bring Mindfulness to Your Company’s Leadership (Harvard Business Review, 2016)

What Google Learned from its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (New York Times, 2016)

Kingbridge founder John Abele speaks on collaboration

Exceptional Leadership, Requires Imaginative Thinking

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Lisa

A few weeks ago we unveiled our second newly designed leadership workshop, Leading From Within, hosted by Kent Osborne. Those that attended the workshop valued one of the leadership tools that Kent shared with us, so we thought we would share this technique with you.

Exceptional leadership demands imaginative thinking. While the analytical thinking of your left brain enables you to manage your business, it’s the intuitive wisdom resident in your right brain that enables you to creatively unlock the knowledge you’ve acquired. Understanding the power of combining logic and intuition is the key to masterfully coaching the men and women directly reporting to you.

Kent’s workshop provided participants with practical, powerful tools for knowing when and how to help your direct reports use imaginative thinking. One tool focused on performance reviews.

Kent directed participants to be wary of spending time discussing performance “in general terms.” This common practice leads to platitudes about what a performer could have done or should have done differently, but it generates no change in future performance and thus adds no value. Instead, leaders should guide direct reports into a detailed discussion about a specific moment in time. The direct report needs to imagine that she is observing herself performing, and from that detailed observation she will literally “feel” both her strengths and her weaknesses. The emotional connection will fuel a specific conversation that will surface meaningful insights about performance improvement.

If your organization wants to get more value from performance reviews, or if you’d like to explore the possibility of transforming the way your leaders coach their direct reports, contact Lisa Gilbert at The Kingbridge Centre and she will discuss how Kent’s work can be customized to meet your learning outcomes.

Conversations that Build Trust, Agility, Resilience & Creativity

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Lisa

Last week at Kingbridge we unveiled our first newly designed leadership workshop, Leading through Conversations that Matter, hosted by Michael Jones. One of the techniques that Michael shared with the group involved using the ecology of a tree to help us understand the distinction and value of learning how to host three very different levels of conversations.

Those who attended the workshop found this valuable so we thought we would share the information with you.

Most organizations are not short of innovative ideas. What they do lack, however, is an environment that allows for the careful enrichment of the soil in order for these seeds of possibility to take root and grow.

What builds this soil is conversation. But not all conversations are the same. The leader’s ‘art’ involves knowing which conversation they are taking part in – and which ones they need to be taking part in – in order to achieve the results they desire.

One picture that helps us understand different levels of conversation is the image of a tree. This image offers a lens for making distinctions between three levels of conversation and how each contributes to growing the culture of an organization.

Level 1: Tactical/Incremental
In Level 1 conversations – the primary question is, “how do we do things differently?”

In Level 1 conversations, the focus is on the distribution of power, influence and getting things done. There is an emphasis on negotiation advocacy, tools, techniques, problem solving, action planning and results.

Level 1 conversations see the enterprise as a mechanical system for which all problems have a corresponding technical or expert-driven response. To extend the tree metaphor, Level I conversations – like the upper branches and the leaves of the tree – are highly sensitized and reactive to changing circumstances. Because they are focused on the performance of the parts rather than the system as a whole, their emphasis is on efficiency-based thinking, quantitatively-driven results and mechanistic responses to problems.

Level 2: Strategic/Transactional
Here the primary question is, – “how do we do different things?”

At Level 2 we see not only the leaves and branches, but their connection to the trunk of the tree as well. Here the focus is on structure and strategy as well as rational problem-solving through policies, technology, detailed plans and systems thinking.

Level 2 conversations shift the emphasis from efficiency to effectiveness, embracing a human resources lens which encompasses human assets and potential, matching people to jobs and working in teams.

Both Level 1 and Level 2 conversations tend to focus on change that is instrumental. They don’t ask the larger questions like ‘why’ or ‘what for?’ For this more profound shift of mindset to occur and to navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world, we need to look to another level of conversation.

Level 3: Regenerative/Transformational
With regenerative Level 3 conversations the primary question is, – not on “how we act differently”, but in “how we see differently.”

Here, there is a shift from mechanistic thinking to engaging with the organization as a living system. If the other levels focus on the leaves, branches and trunk, Level 3 conversations examine the soil and the root system underneath.

By ‘regenerative’, I mean conversations that focus not only on the people, the power and the structure of the system, but also on the culture and the sense of place where the leader is also the steward, the sage or prophet, the storyteller and place maker.

At Level 3 there is a greater attention on dialogue and listening together as well as on the regenerative power of beauty, destiny, synchronicity and mythic thinking in which art and poetry, music and celebration carry an equal voice. Generative conversations are participative, reciprocal and imaginative. They involve a collective search for deeper meanings and insights to emerge.

In so doing, these conversations shift the focus from preserving the life of the tree to growing the tree into a sturdy and fertile oak through the constant turning and care of the soil.

Eighty percent of what determines the health of a tree is the condition of the soil – the ‘magic’ that supports and nourishes its roots. In the context of an organization, this ‘magic’ is found within its creative spirit: conversations about what we aspire to, about when we feel vital and alive, about the gifts and heritage from our past and our present challenges and opportunities. These are ‘root’ conversations that focus on the common roots of our shared human experience. As such, they create the fertile ground – so frequently passed over in a fast-paced environment – where the seeds of our future can take root and grow.

It is commonly believed that the fastest way to change a system is with Level 1 and Level 2 conversations. So the overwhelming majority of an organization’s attention is usually focused in these two areas and the typical goal-setting processes that have been used for decades emphasize specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and strategic time-bound results. Yet these rarely correlate with either work satisfaction or real success.

We need to be highly literate with Level 1 and Level 2 conversations while being aware that they concentrate our attention on the most obvious and visible issues. They promote an expert-driven ‘outside in’ response and rarely evoke a fundamental shift of mind when practiced without Level 3.

All levels of learning are necessary, but only Level 3 conversations invite us into seeing new possibilities in the future. As such they take tactical and strategic learning in new directions that could not have been foreseen in advance.

The practice of engaging in Level 3 conversations connects us with how nature itself creates and sustains life. We become allies with each other and our destiny in ways that intellect, tactics, and strategies alone cannot encompass. Our destiny is rooted in the rich soil of intuitive wisdom, the power of place, our heart’s desires, our greatest aspirations, the gifts in each person and the collective intelligence that has called us to be together on this journey.

The Near Future of Work

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Lisa

As the baby boomers retire and organizational leadership begins to make the shift into the next generation, a functional work environment will come with a significantly different set of required skills for success. Skills such as being trans-disciplinary rather than specialized and adaptive rather than rule driven will determine success. The workforce is already displaying the need for emphasis on such skill sets but finds itself in a state of limbo until the last vestiges of traditional leadership depart.

The infographic below distributed by top10onlinecolleges.org outlines not only the skills that are projected to be the most important to possess to be successful in the near future (2020) but also identifies the drivers of change responsible for the shift in workforce need such as technology and shifts in organizational structure.

Source: Top10OnlineColleges.org

This week Kingbridge would like you to ask yourself: Am I ready for the near ‘future of work’?

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Collaboration?

Posted on May 23, 2014 by John and Lisa

It has come to my attention recently that in these articles we have often explored the nuances of collaboration including the conditions and behaviours needed to get it right and the barriers you may face to success and how to identify pseudo collaborations but we have very minimally referenced the pit falls of too much collaboration.

It is indisputable that organizations leveraging properly executed collaborations produce superior innovation and results over traditional bureaucratic systems. However, that doesn’t mean that every decision in an organization needs to be a collaborative effort. As part of HBR’s Insight Center “Getting Collaboration Right” authors Morten T. Hansen and Herminia Ibarra identify the 2 main traps organizations fall into when ‘trying to get it right’:

Under-collaboration. Companies that operate as a collection of silos commit the cardinal sin of under-performing. Both ideas and money are left on the table because managers are unwilling or unable to combine resources to create new products, or share best practices to improve efficiency. Sony for example was unable to come up with its version of iPod/iTunes because divisions competed with one another.

Over-collaboration. The alternative problem is that collaboration sometimes goes too far. It sets in when people collaborate on the wrong things or when collaboration efforts get bogged down in endless discussions and consensus decision-making in which no one is clearly accountable. The result is slow and poor execution. At the oil giant BP a few years back, efforts to promote collaboration across the many operating business were so successful that employees over-collaborated. According to former CIO John Leggate: “People always had a good reason for meetings. You’re sharing best practices. You’re having good conversations with like-minded people. But increasingly, we found that people were flying around the world and simply sharing ideas without always having a strong focus on the bottom line.” Only when they calibrated their effort did BP reap benefits from collaboration.

So yes, you can over-collaborate. Having said that, the example of over-collaboration above was missing a key component of any organizational culture as a whole – accountability. In a successful collaborative culture an organization shares common values and goals, as such everyone in that organization is accountable for putting their maximum effort towards achieving those goals. Any organizational systems designed to reward collaboration must take steps to ensure what they are promoting is disciplined collaboration.

The Kingbridge Insight this week is one I am sure you have heard many times before: Collaboration isn’t easy! It takes extensive planning, knowledge, behavioural considerations and self reflection not to mention re-designing entire corporate cultures to even give all that work a chance to be successful! It is not to be taken lightly, real collaboration is a massive undertaking and doing it wrong can be as damaging to an organization as not doing it at all.

Do your Collaborative Leadership Skills measure up?

Posted on March 14, 2014 by John

Carrying on the same vein as the last post, we move forward to the increasingly essential skill of collaboration, specifically for leaders.

The Ivey Business Journal recently published an article “The Collaboration Imperative” exploring one of the greatest management challenges of the 21st century – cultivating collaborative leadership skills. Author Rick Lash of The Hay Group, discusses how in the current and accelerating complexity and unpredictability of markets that companies will “need leaders who are highly adaptive, continuous learners, able to lead diverse groups across functional disciplines, regions and cultures.” Essentially, whether across teams, borders or function leaders will need to collaborate.

The first key point in this article – that can not be stressed enough – is that the skills required for collaboration are NOT the same as those required to work effectively in a functional team. As a leader you may excel at ‘teamwork’ but this does not lend to your credibility as an effective collaborator. A Hay Group study found that most executives still require considerable development in influence, inspirational leadership, coaching, mentoring and emotional self-awareness – the competencies that are not necessarily needed for successful ‘teamwork’ but absolutely imperative for collaboration. In short, leadership skill sets have not kept up with the evolution of the marketplace and subsequent shift to flatter organizational structures.

One of the obvious barriers to collaborative leadership is the organizational culture. If the leader is rewarded based only on his departmental performance rather than that of the organization as a whole he/she is unlikely to put long term cross functional collaboration as a priority. regardless if the skill set to do so exists or not.
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Although it is acknowledged that organizational culture plays a considerable role in successful collaborative leadership, the list below succinctly summarizes the key collaborative competencies required in an individual to be successful as a collaborative leader:

Enterprise perspective – they have a comprehensive understanding of the company’s overall business strategy and how the joint work they are leading aligns with that strategy. They use this understanding to resolve any conflicts that may arise.
Cross-functional perspective – they understand the needs, metrics, incentives and deliverables of different functions and business units. They can align these competing priorities within the operating model.
Customer perspective – they not only understand the customers’ interests and needs, they also know how to keep the team focused on making the decisions that enhance the overall customer experience.
Self-management – they exhibit self-control when challenged. They have patience when dealing with colleagues who may have trouble understanding the shared purpose of the collaboration initiative. They do not take disagreements personally.
Listen with respect – they listen objectively and respectfully to multiple opinions. They empathize with colleagues whose position, situation or perspective may differ from their own. They start with the assumption that collaborators are capable and will do their best.
Matrix influencing – they excel at communicating with different stakeholders and influencing them to support collaborative projects.

The level of these competencies can be broadly assessed with the following questions:

1.    Can this leader achieve results by influencing rather than directing?
2.    Can this leader share ownership, even if it means sharing credit and rewards?
3.    Can this leader delegate and let others deliver results?
4.    Has this leader demonstrated the ability to motivate groups of diverse individuals who may not share her viewpoints or perspectives?
5.    Has this leader demonstrated the ability to make and implement decisions collaboratively?
6.    Can this leader get results even when he has no direct control over people or resources?

Now that you have self assessed your abilities against the competencies above and considered your own growth areas to achieve ‘master’ level collaborative skills and have devised a plan to become the best collaborator you can be……. I will temper this with the Kingbridge Insight for this week which is that collaborative skills and leadership abilities are not in themselves a solution. Perhaps the greatest strength of any collaborative leader is to know how to select collaboration opportunities wisely and to recognize when they are not working or not true collaborations.

How are your Strategic Leadership Skills?

Posted on February 28, 2014 by John

Today’s Fast Track article offered several guidelines/tips on how to be an effective strategic leader. Upon reading this simple yet insightful article it struck me that many of the guidelines could easily be transformed into questions leaders could use for self-assessment (or alternatively, by others in a 360 review).

The article focused on 3 Key areas of Leadership: Knowing your Business, Decision Making and Inspiring Others. Below are some questions based on each of these areas that every leader should ask themselves – many are obvious and simple to respond to while others may be cause for reflection:

Knowing your Business:
Effective leaders have in depth knowledge of their business and are continually learning.

1. How does your company make money?
2. What is your competitive advantage?
a. Have you spoken directly to your customers to understand their needs and
perceptions?
3. Where is your industry headed?

Decision Making:
Once you have the knowledge a strategic leader must know how to apply it appropriately.

1. Are you responsive or hasty?
2. Do you reflect or overanalyize?
3. Do you make decisions with any of these common biases?
a. Similar-to-me effect (favoring those who look, act, think like you)
b. Confirmation bias (remembering only the facts that support your viewpoint)
c. Halo effect (allowing one very positive or negative item to overshadow your opinion)
d. Hindsight bias (wrongly perceiving past events as predictable, “I knew it!”)

Inspiring Others:
Knowledge and decision making ability will only make you a good individual contributor, to be a true leader you must inspire and encourage the same in others.

1. Are you optimistic with a focus on possibilities or do you focus on limitations?
2. Have you created and shared a clear aspirational vision?
3. Are you passionate about reaching goals?
5. Are you able to present ideas simply and clearly so they can be understood and repeated by all?

So, how did you do?

The Kingbridge Insight this week is an observation that although the above is a very quick and simplistic high level assessment of leadership it is a good place to start none the less. So many leaders are intimidated by the plethora of ‘assessment tools’ out there that require hours or more to complete and then provide results that are not easily interpreted nor extrapolated into usable/actionable information. Rather than diving right into the deep end perhaps it is wiser – and ultimately more effective – to wade into the shallow end first!

The Dominance Problem

Posted on January 24, 2014 by John

Another classic problem of most meetings is the dominance problem. A few people intimidate others. As a meeting organizer or leader how can you mitigate the negative effects these people can have on potential collaborations?

Sometimes a few loud individuals can dominate your meetings. And that can lead to quiet people (e.g. introverts) not sharing their best ideas. There are lots of ways to manage this psychological dynamic between the louder and quieter people in your meetings. But one such technique is called the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), an alternative to traditional brainstorming. NGT prevents the domination of discussion by a single person, encourages the more passive group members to participate, and results in a set of prioritized solutions or recommendations.

Let’s say your team is trying to make a decision, for example; imagine you’re trying to decide whether to bring your proposal to the CEO now or wait until after the Board meeting. Now, this is a classic situation where a few louder voices could steamroll the rest of the group.

So, as the team leader, what you do is ask everyone to write down their opinion on a sheet of paper. Then you collect those papers and record the opinions on a white board or flip chart and vote. This forces team members who wouldn’t have otherwise spoken up to voice their opinions. It also minimizes the effect of group members who would otherwise dominate the conversation. And yet, everyone still has input, and you get all of the best possible ideas.

You, as team leader, can control each of the member’s voices. You can control their input, the flow, and the tone of it.

Another benefit of the nominal group technique is that it reduces Groupthink because it encourages independent thinking – people don’t get swayed by listening to everyone else’s arguments.

An alternative to the manual recording method for Nominal Group Technique is to utilize a collaborative technology tool such as an audience response application like Turning Point or one of the many smartphone applications or a decision support application like Think Tank.

The Kingbridge Insight this week is to encourage you as a leader, whether of a group or an entire organization to continuously try new techniques for group engagement – the results will speak for themselves. Also, and perhaps more importantly, ask for help if you need it! Consult a professional management consultant or if you are in the Greater Toronto Area give us a call and we can connect you with one of our trusted advisers. There are resources out there to help you reach your goals – tap into them!

Gaining Influence

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Lisa

As a functional manager it is one thing to know that you have the information and potentially the answers to some of your organizations issues, it is quite another to influence senior or corporate management’s decisions.

In the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review researchers Anette Mikes, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business Review along with Matthew Hall, London School of Economics and Yuval Millo, University of Leicester wrote “How Experts Gain Influence” about the findings of their 5 year study on gaining influence in an organization.

They found that in order to increase their impact, functional leaders should develop four specific competencies:

1. Trailblazing: finding new opportunities to use your expertise
This particular mode of influence involves uncovering previously unidentified issues or challenges that may prevent the organization from achieving its goals or initiatives.

2. Toolmaking: developing and deploying tools that embody and spread expertise
Basically, come up with succinct but simple tools, such as reports or visual models that can be employed cross-functionally for greater visibility, understanding and ultimately consideration.

3. Teamwork: using personal interaction to take in others’ expertise and convince people of the relevance of your own
This competency draws heavily on harnessing collective intelligence across the organization and as a result creating inclusiveness and buy in. For example, if you were creating a reporting tool (see toolmaking) great influence and support will be gained by engaging other functional managers in the design.

4. Translation: personally helping decision makers understand complex content
Keep it simple! Use your own expertise to interpret information into a usable format and actively engage yourself in the explanation.

Although these four competences identified by Mikes, Hall and Millo may seem basic and perhaps have an air of common sense, execution is often hindered by the same barriers we see to collaboration such as ego and hidden agendas. As such, this weeks Kingbridge Insight is to suggest that if you struggle with attaining influence as a functional ‘expert’ perhaps the solution is self reflection – are you allowing your personal behavioural barriers prevent you from demonstrating the competencies required to be influential in your organization?

Leadership based on common sense

Posted on June 24, 2013 by John

John Abele talks about how increasing complexity in business is distracting us from the ‘basics’ of leadership and value delivery.

Leadership based on common sense from Kingbridge Conference Centre on Vimeo.

Today’s Kingbridge Insight from Owner, John Abele:

“Every organization needs rules of behavior, and generally more as the organization grows. Some of those rules are to follow government laws and regulations, while others are focused on providing an environment where everybody can be most productive and enable the company to achieve its goals in a profitable and sustainable manner. The best companies are those which treat employees as responsible citizens who understand the goals of rules rather than viewing them as boxes to check.”

Kingbridge Conference Centre and Institute

Open Minds and Expand Thinking "The paradox of real collaboration is that it is not about getting the best minds together – it's about creating a New Mind Set."

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