Ann was upset with her boss. During a leadership program I was conducting she complained that he scheduled team meetings every Friday at 5pm. Oh, I said, 5pm on a Friday does sound like an unproductive time to meet. When I asked what her boss said when she confronted him, Ann responded that it was impossible to do that because he doesn’t like to be challenged. She even got angry with me when I said it wasn’t impossible to confront him. Rather, I said, she simply didn’t want to live with the consequences of challenging him, despite knowing it was the right thing to do. Ann sulked the rest of the afternoon. By the way, Ann is a vice president of her company.
Two founding partners of a technology startup asked me to resolve some of their conflicts. Hal initially convinced me that Dave was an antagonistic bully. Dave then convinced me that Hal was a scheming weasel. Yet when I met them individually, they both seemed quite pleasant. Was either of them right? No, they were both wrong. Hal and Dave fell into the Fundamental Attribution Error trap. The FAE is a cognitive bias, or thinking error, through which we ascribe other peoples’ irritating behavior to their personalities (i.e., ‘he completely took over the meeting because he’s a control freak’). But we attribute our own behavior to the circumstances we are in (‘No one was stepping up so I had to move things along’).
A client from Amsterdam used to watch me facilitate leadership programs for his company’s executives. At the end of each session I’d ask him how he thought it went. Mark would look very serious and say, “Robert, not everything is AWESOME.” He’d pronounce ‘awesome’ in a Dutch inflected fake New York accent, and we’d both crack up laughing. Even though it was funny, Mark was sending me a message. In Mark’s culture, drawing attention to oneself and one’s work is discouraged. In fact, to express approval, Mark would often say to me, “it could have been worse.” Some praise!
Fast Company magazine recently featured 50 companies they ranked as most innovative. My attention was not drawn to the super-cool technology start-ups, but to some old-line companies that successfully reinvented themselves. I wondered: Are the factors that lead to corporate transformation similar to the factors that contribute to the reinvention of individuals?
Google recently conducted a study of their internal teams to answer the question, “what makes teams great?” After rigorous analysis and over 200 interviews, they found the most significant factor for team performance is ‘psychological safety,’ trusting that you can speak your mind without feeling insecure or embarrassed. I wish it were that simple…
A client of mine is struggling to remain competitive in an industry where smaller, more agile competitors are nibbling away at their market share. They believe that their organizational culture needs to change in order to be successful. In a recent phone call with the company’s top leaders I asked who was responsible for creating the organization’s culture. Crickets. Finally, the head of strategy said, “To be honest, we feel more like custodians of the culture than the creators.” Someone else on the call piped in, “Actually, we are more culture complainers than culture creators!” That didn’t sound good.
Have you ever gotten in your car, driven to work, found a parking spot, sat at your desk, and wondered: How did I get here? If you ever experienced this, you were probably on automatic pilot, unconscious of what you were doing because you do it so often. Now let’s say you got in your car, started to drive, and suddenly a detour took you far out of your way. What happened then? Perhaps you began to worry about missing an important morning meeting. Probably, you drove with heightened awareness, your grip tightening on the steering wheel. And maybe you arrived at the office grouchy, immediately complaining to your co-workers about those so-and-sos who messed up traffic during rush hour.
I feel like I’m losing my mind from the mega-buzz surrounding mindfulness lately. Many companies, including Google and Target, are investing in mindfulness training for their employees. The National Institute of Health is pouring millions to research the effect of mindfulness on depression, obesity, and even the common cold. Even the journal American Psychologist devoted its most recent special issue to the emergence of mindfulness in psychological science. The few of us uninitiated souls may wonder what this is all about, and even wonder what mindfulness is. Well here it is: Mindfulness is any practice used to focus on an object, such as one’s breath or a point in space, and then become aware when one’s mind has wandered, and then bring awareness back to the object. In other words: meditation.
Everybody believed Paul was the problem. His teammates complained in anonymous interviews that he was overly critical and negative. They said he dominated conversations, and became aggressive when someone disagreed with him. Despite acknowledging his deep technical knowledge, Paul’s teammates said that if he left the team they would be more effective. Ouch. But Paul wasn’t their only complaint. They also grumbled about not having influence with the senior executives who sponsored their work. And they criticized Mary, the team leader, for not confronting Paul or their senior leaders. I had been hired by Mary to facilitate the development of her team. Part of my agreement with Mary was to provide the team with the anonymous input from my interviews. I commonly use this approach (called action research), but I had never heard such a hairball of negativity from a team before.
Your boss passes you in the hallway a few hours after you led an important meeting. She stops you and says, “Hey, about that meeting this morning. I have some feedback for you.” At that moment, what do you think: “wow, that’s great,” or, “oh crap, now what?” If you are like most of us humans, you will want to flee rather than endure your boss’s ‘feedback.’ But this is an odd reaction when you consider the research on professional development. These studies reveal that people are hungry for feedback and believe that feedback is essential for their progress. So, we say we want feedback but we would sooner run for the hills when it is offered. Why the contradiction?
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