Leadership Today - Practical Tips For Leaders

Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.

We are part way through a six week coverage of the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. So far we've looked at the importance of Reflecting, Inspiring, Developing and Connecting. The fifth daily practice that we will explore today is Delegating.

I used to really struggle with delegating. When I first became a manager I quickly realised that I needed to delegate. There just weren't enough hours in the day. But often times it was quicker and easier to just do something myself. I saw delegating as a short-term efficiency effort that didn't work in the short-term and definitely wasn't efficient. Eventually I came to understand that delegation is actually about long-term development and capability building. Once that light came on, I was happy to delegate anything. The unavoidable dip in performance and quality that came with delegation didn't put me off - rather, it was a reminder that the person was learning.

Leaders who focus on Delegating regularly undertake four activities:

1. Delegate important work - great leaders take key parts of their role and delegate them to their people.
2. Take a long-term view - you have to extend your focus beyond this week or this month when it comes to delegating.
3. Provide feedback - relentless feedback is a key part of successful delegation. But be clear that your intent is to help the person to improve, and not to micromanage what they're doing.
4. Focus on accountabilities - people may well do things differently to the way you would have. In fact, they may even do it better. Give people plenty of autonomy about how to get things done.

I'm sure, of that list, there are at least one or two actions you could increase this week. If you want to review the list I've included them in the show notes.

Summary

We would all hope that going good for others helps to create more positive work places. Recent research highlights the contagious nature of kind acts at work.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 80 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at the surprising benefits of doing good.

We would all hope that doing good for others helps to create more positive workplaces. But doing good can become scarce when people are under pressure.

Let's start with the flip side to doing good. In episode 62 I shared Christine Porath's work on incivility in the workplace highlighting the negative impact on work effort, quality and performance which also tends to flow on to treatment of customers. Whether it's losing your temper, being rude, withholding information, running down someone's reputation, or sabotaging a piece of work, it's easy to see how incivility is so damaging in the workplace. So organisations have made a real effort to reduce these sorts of negative behaviours.

All those efforts, at best, take us back to a neutral position where people aren't being actively negative towards others. But it's really difficult to be neutral towards other people. We tend to be either positive or negative in our impact during our interactions with those around us.

Each of the world's major religions have a variation of the golden rule - treat others as you would like them to treat you. In Judaism it's expressed as loving your neighbour as yourself, words that Jesus restates during the early foundations of Christianity. From that perspective, the golden rule is not just a minimum standard, but a call to be kind and good to others.

I know you're already thanking me for the first year philosophy and ethics lecture so let's take a deeper look at the research around doing good at work, or what researchers typically call pro-social behaviour.

A just released research review from The University of Texas demonstrates that cooperative behaviour is contagious. When people see someone perform an act of kindness, they in turn are more likely to be kind. And the effect wasn't just about being on the receiving end of the positive act. In fact, the motivation to be kind was strongest when the kind act was witnessed, rather than when it was personally received. That's right - you're more likely to be kind to others when you see someone being kind, rather than being on the receiving end of kindness.

Another study undertaken in the workplace included participants who were asked to perform acts of kindness for their colleagues. The impact of these kind actions were noticed by others, leading to greater perceived levels of autonomy and higher ratings of happiness. The study even found the old adage to be true - that it's better to give than receive. Those undertaking acts of kindness rated their life satisfaction and job satisfaction higher a full month after the intervention finished. Those on the receiving end of kind acts also tended to pay that kindness forward to others.

So the research is pretty clear - if you want to increase the amount of good in your workplace, share examples of people being good towards others. This role-modelling is particularly powerful when it comes from leaders. In a large organisation where I used to work, there was an executive elevator that ran express from the executive car park up to the executive floor. The most senior people could make their way through an entire day without ever seeing anyone that wasn't an executive. The CEO at the time made a conscious effort to take the elevator from the car park to the ground floor, get out, and then catch the regular elevator with everyone else. He would ask for people's names and engage in conversation. That simple act probably cost him 10 minutes a day, but it role-modelled that under his leadership anyone could talk to anyone. The message was clear - if the CEO makes an effort to engage with frontline staff, then maybe I should do the same.

So what can you do as a leader to boost the amount of good in your workplace? Here are some ideas:

1. Be kind to others - it will benefit them and you, and it is also likely to be contagious

2. Recruit others to also be kind to others - find some peers who are willing to join you in doing good

3. Share examples of kind acts - this will motivate others to be kind themselves

As always, I hope you found this episode helpful. Can you believe it, we're up to episode 80 so remember we've got a whole back catalogue of research and advice in episodes like this. Just go to the leadership.today website to track those down. I look forward to speaking with you again next week.

Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone D. Henderson, Erika A. Patall. Prosocial modeling: A meta-analytic review and synthesis.. Psychological Bulletin, 2020; DOI: 10.1037/bul0000235

Chancellor, J., Margolis, S., Jacobs Bao, K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Everyday prosociality in the workplace: The reinforcing benefits of giving, getting, and glimpsing. Emotion, 18(4), 507–517. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000321

Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.

We are part way through a six week coverage of the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. So far we've looked at the importance of Reflecting, Inspiring and Developing. The fourth daily practice that we will explore today is Connecting.

Deci and Ryan describe three basic human needs that we all have - competence, autonomy and relatedness. We need to feel confident and effective, and also have a sense of control. But we also need to feel we belong, that we are cared for, and have an opportunity to care for others. That might all sound too warm and fuzzy for some. Do organisations really need to provide this sense of belonging and care? Can't people just sort that out on the weekends?

But those same people may well want increased productivity, collaboration, and integration across departments. They are the organisational benefits of leaders that focus on Connecting. Connecting is the glue that holds the organisation together, while also sustaining people to deliver into the future.

How are you going as a leader when it comes to the daily practice of Connecting? Here's a quick checkup.

Leaders who focus on Connecting regularly undertake four activities:

1. Connect people with potential supporters - as a leader you don't need to be the sole source of support and encouragement. Help people to find mentors and other supports across the organisation.
2. Identify organisation-strengthening opportunities - Connecting leaders proactively develop ways to bring different divisions, departments and teams together.
3. Build teamwork - they invest in helping the team to come together and perform more effectively. They recognise it's about task, process and relationships.
4. Provide support and encouragement - Connecting leaders care for people and help them to feel that they belong.

I'm sure, of that list, there are at least one or two actions you could dial up this week. If you want to review the list I've included them in the show notes. Have a great week.

If you think back over the best workplaces you've been a part of, fun was probably a key element. However, the fun was likely to have felt quite natural rather than forced. This week we look at five ways to make the workplace more fun.

Hello and welcome to episode 79 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at five ways to make the workplace more fun.

If you think back over the best workplaces you've been a part of, fun was probably a key element. However, the fun was likely to have felt quite natural rather than forced. And, in those examples, the fun probably helped rather than hindered productivity.

When times are challenging, our instinct might be to steer away from an enjoyable and light-hearted approach to work. However it is still possible to take the work and results seriously, while also being less serious about the way we deliver.

Research indicates a number of benefits in having fun workplaces:

• Attracting and retaining staff

• Engagement

• Positive mood and emotions

• Increased job satisfaction

• Increased organisational commitment

• Reduced emotional exhaustion - fun actually buffered employees against the otherwise taxing parts of their role

However building a sense of fun can be tricky to achieve. There's a fine line between real fun and forced fun.

In a business where I used to work, we had an annual Work Christmas party. This usually included lunch at a nice restaurant and some fun activities. However one year we decided to have a dinner instead. Given it was at night instead of during the day, one team member asked if the Christmas party was compulsory and whether they would be paid to attend. I thought they were joking. They weren't. It turns out that not all fun is created equal. What one person loves, another despises.

What we are aiming for is fun with a point. It's not fun for it's own sake. And that's where the research can help.

One study focused on four different dimensions of workplace fun and the impact on the level of connection people felt with their organisation. The findings of their study highlighted that not all fun is created equal. They found the following in order of effectiveness:

1. Fun job responsibilities - fun worked best when it was baked into the job itself

2. Coworker socialising - fun with colleagues is great and doesn't need to be formal

3. Manager support for fun - it helps if your manager actually supports fun in the workplace - again that was quite positive

4. Formal fun activities - when we try to add fun to work as an additional activity it is far less effective

The key is to make core elements of the work itself more fun. It's not about adding fun to work (although that still doesn't hurt), it's about making the work more fun.

Here are five things we can try as leaders:

1. It starts by asking a simple question - What do people enjoy doing? Why not ask your team how they think you could make the work more fun? You might be surprised at what people come up with. A team I managed introduced a scoreboard to track their productivity across the day including a mini presentation ceremony. That worked really well for a few weeks to lighten up an otherwise administratively-heavy task.

2. Provide meaningful core responsibilities. Even mundane tasks can become positive if we can help people to find enjoyment and satisfaction. Link the task to the broader purpose. Work with people to align the work to their interests.

3. Introduce variety - that might include job rotations, special projects, or opportunities for people to innovate. People love an opportunity to try new things.

4. See enjoyment as something important to factor in when crafting the job. Give people as much freedom as possible over when and how they complete their work.

5. Change your mindset about fun. It's easy to see fun as a waste of time. However, a group of people laughing together can help to build connections, engagement and productivity.

The research clearly shows us that fun with a point can make a great contribution to our workplaces. Why not work with your team this week to get creative and lighten things up?

Michael J. Tews John Michel Shi Xu Alex J. Drost , (2015),"Workplace fun matters … but what else?", Employee Relations, Vol. 37 Iss 2 pp. 248 - 267

Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.

We are part way through a six week coverage of the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. These practices are based on research I've conducted over the past three years across thousands of leaders to identify what outstanding leaders actually do that makes a difference when engaging their people and producing results. So far we've looked at the importance of Reflecting and Inspiring. The third daily practice that we will explore today is Developing.

Ongoing development is important to build the capacity of our organisations, but it's also important in motivating individuals to contribute. Research I've conducted shows that those who are developing capability in areas that are important to them have 26% lower negative work-related stress and 60% higher engagement. Not only that, but their likelihood of staying with the organisation for more than a year is 87% higher than those who don't feel they're developing capability through their work.

As leaders, we need capable and motivated people. Developing people through their work is an essential investment.

Leaders who focus on Developing regularly undertake four activities:

1. Identify capability needs - they assess what skills and capabilities are required to deliver.
2. Clarify development interests - they work with their people to identify what they want to learn. Great leaders Invest in that development even if it isn't core now. It's about retention, and also building capacity for the future. We don't always know what skills will be needed, or the benefit of people applying new skills.
3. Coach people towards growth - great leaders coach on a daily basis. They ask questions and guide people to come up with their own insights and solutions.
4. Recognise and celebrate progress - they make a big deal out of people applying what they have learned. They look for opportunities to catch people getting better.

Developing is great for our organisations and our people. What are you going to try today?

When have you learned the most at work? I bet it wasn't sitting in a training course. In this week's podcast we look at the four best ways to learn at work.

Hello and welcome to episode 78 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at the four best ways to learn at work.

When have you learned the most at work? Was it sitting in a training course? Probably not. We usually learn best through stretching assignments where we are placed outside our comfort zone, with a supportive leader and team around us. We often try to add learning to work. However it is far better to learn through our work.

Charles Jennings has long championed this approach to learning. He believes we should focus on extracting learning from the work we do, rather than adding learning on top of our work. We should therefore focus more on performance metrics rather than learning metrics. Our performance is the key measure of our learning. We have learned something new when we can demonstrate it, not when we can restate it. And that learning should flow through to our performance on the job.

Charles outlines four drivers of learning. Let's step through each of those in turn, along with some practical examples.

The first driver of learning is exposure to rich and challenging experiences. As leaders we need to delegate important and challenging work to our people. From a development perspective, we can't wait until we're 100% confident that someone can deliver before we delegate. People learn through opportunities to be stretched. Delegation is not about short-term efficiency. Whenever you delegate, there is always going to be a short-term drop in performance. The key is to provide support and encouragement to help people push through the discomfort of learning.

The second driver of learning Charles Jennings identifies is the opportunity to practice. To learn, we need some freedom to experiment and try things out. We recently shifted a face-to-face leadership program to an online format. The facilitation team had varying levels of experience and comfort in delivering online. Most, including me, had never delivered a multiple day program in this way. So part of the learning process was to practice and experiment with the platform. We encouraged people to use the platform to catch up with family and friends - to just play with the technology in a real setting. That meant the occasional drop out and technical issue, but it's much better to have those in a practice session than during the real thing. No amount of online how-to videos could have equated to the learning of actually practicing using the platform.

The third driver of learning is participation in rich conversations and networks. It is really important to have people to share ideas and feedback with. I have always sought to be part of small groups of people for the purposes of learning. As a leader I encourage you to connect people together from across the organisation to form learning groups. Such peer learning opportunities are really powerful as people have the chance to coach and learn from each other with a focus on real work.

The fourth driver is spaces for reflection. In order to maximise our learning we need time to reflect while we are working, and time away from the work to reflect as well. Let's be honest - no one is going to mandate or schedule that reflection time for you. You need to set aside time yourself to reflect. But you can encourage your team members to spend time reflecting. It's great to ask people about what they can do now that they couldn't do a month ago. That will encourage people to reflect back on just how much they have learned. Without reflection, we often miss the opportunity to consolidate what we have learned.

These past few months have been a massive opportunity to learn through our work. With millions of people thrown into working remotely, we've all had to learn on the run. That might have included figuring out how to unmute ourselves on Zoom, or how to structure our days when working from home, or working out how to lead people remotely. To make the most of this globally enforced learning opportunity, it's important to continue to stretch ourselves, to practice, to discuss what we're learning with others, and to take the time to reflect on what we have learned. And, as leaders, we need to encourage and support out people to do the same. That way we will emerge with even greater capability and capacity as individuals and organisations.

Charles Jennings - The Four Ways Adults Learn : Learning Technologies 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ItF1s9O9Y

Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.

We are part way through a six week coverage of the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. These practices are based on research I've conducted over the past three years across thousands of leaders to identify what outstanding leaders actually do that makes a difference when engaging their people and producing results. Last week we looked at the importance of Reflecting. The second daily practice that we will explore today is Inspiring.

As leaders, we want motivated people who are aligned to the direction we're heading as an organisation. But aligned motivation doesn't just happen - it takes effort. And we can't force anyone to be motivated. Instead, a key part of achieving aligned motivation is inspiring our team members.

What does it take to inspire someone? First, it's important to recognise that what inspires one person may not inspire the next. We can't just push out the same message to everyone the same way. Just like any other influencing exercise, we need to start by understanding the individual. Which brings us to the four activities of Inspiring.

Inspiring leaders:

1. Understand what motivates their people - they take the time to uncover what connects people to the work, and what motivates them outside of work
2. Communicate a compelling vision - the leader takes their plans and shapes them into a vision that is clear, concise and memorable
3. Align individuals to the vision - they work with each individual to help explain the vision and why it matters in a way that is aligned with the individual's interests
4. Define roles in the context of the vision - the leader ensures all the work that is undertaken links back to the vision

Inspiring isn't a once a year activity. We can't just leave inspiring up to the most senior leaders in our organisations. Inspiring is a daily practice of every outstanding leader. What are you going to try today?

In a world that's unpredictable, creativity is more important than ever. But we often treat creativity like it's an inherited skill - something you're either born with, or not. Does that then rule us non-creative types out? Or can we make ourselves more creative?

Hello and welcome to episode 77 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we explore ways to make ourselves and our teams more creative.

In a world that's unpredictable, creativity is more important than ever. But we often treat creativity like it's an inherited skill - something you're either born with, or not. Does that then rule us non-creative types out? Or can we make ourselves more creative? While the field of creativity research is a bit of a mess of conflicting models and ideas, most research supports that people can make themselves more creative. So how do we do that?

Well, first of all, let's define creativity. Creativity is about producing something genuinely new, even if we eventually take that new thing for granted.

A great example is the development of the first iPhone. The iPhone was announced in January 2007, and launched later that same year. It's worth watching a recording of the launch and I've provided a link as a reference in the show notes. In the video, Steve Jobs takes to the stage and announces that Apple is launching three revolutionary products - a widescreen iPod with touch controls (and there's some enthusiastic cheering), a revolutionary mobile phone (louder cheers), and the third a breakthrough internet communication device (muted cheers). He then keeps repeating "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" and then asks "Are you getting it?" He then blows people away by saying "These are not three devices, these are one device". When he demonstrates the multi-touch screen by using his finger to scroll through a list of songs, people in the audience gasp. In a world where all smart phones had keyboards and extremely convoluted software, the iPhone was something completely out of the box. But now we take all those revolutionary features for granted. Now every smart phone looks pretty much the same as the next.

All of this plays to the narrative that people like Steve Jobs are the exception. Surely they are creative geniuses from birth and mere mortals like us could never be that creative and smart. And we often equate being creative with being smart. But being creative can also be about being unrestrained, and that is something research suggests we can learn and develop,

For example, research was conducted with jazz musicians with varying levels of experience. After they had warmed up, each musician was asked to improvise over a pre-recorded track as they "normally would in a jazz setting". This was the baseline. They were then given three more tries, but told they should "improvise even more creatively than your past performance". Those with less experience did markedly better when consciously deciding to be more creative. For the musicians the key was actually about less effort and worrying less about judgement, both their own and others'.

Daniel Kahneman talks about two ways of thinking in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow - system 1 and system 2. Neither system is perfect, and both are necessary.

System 1 - thinking fast - is fast, automatic, emotional, unconscious, and biased. System 2 - thinking slow - is conscious, effortful, logical, and calculating. One of his arguments is that we think of ourselves in terms of system 2, but the reality is we can never turn off system 1. Creativity involves using both of these systems to make the most of our experience and intuition.

Here are five tips for being more creative, whether it's individually or leading a team:

1. Decide when you are going to be creative. If you're working with others, let them know that's what you're doing. That will give you and others permission to be more loose on logic.

2. Pose provocative questions, What if? Here you want to beg, borrow and steal from other business models like Uber, AirBnB or Netflix. You can take any business model and think about how that might apply to your business or product.

3. Free yourself from constraints. We are focusing here on the volume of ideas. Judging the merits will be relatively easy - we're all experienced at punching holes in ideas. So take the time to ditch fear and judgement.

4. Pay attention in the shower. Our best ideas rarely emerge through conscious effort, but rather when we are relaxed. Creativity is as much about letting your mind wander as it is about focused problem solving.

5. Decide when to be practical. All that creativity is worthless if you don't apply it. Again, if you're working with others let them know that's what you're doing. It's time to critique the ideas and put together a road map.

So we can all be more creative through a combination of effort and intuition. Why not explore creativity with your team this week

And just a reminder that I do have some more webinars coming up. You can go to the Leadership.Today website to find those, and I've also included recordings of some of the previous webinars.

You'll also find details of our online facilitated workshops including Well-Being For Leaders and The Six Daily Practices of Remote Leadership. We can run those with your teams. They're around an hour each, and we can run that with any number up to 100 participants.

Anyway, I hope you have a great week and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with you again next week.

Rosen, D. S., Kim, Y. E., Mirman, D., & Kounios, J. (2017). All you need to do is ask? The exhortation to be creative improves creative performance more for nonexpert than expert jazz musicians. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(4), 420–427.

iPhone launch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGoM_wVrwng

Welcome to midweek motivate, where our goal is to build your leadership and give you something practical to try with your team.

For the next six weeks we're going to be exploring the Six Daily Practices of Outstanding Leaders. These practices are based on research I've conducted over the past three years across thousands of leaders to identify what outstanding leaders actually do that makes a difference when engaging their people and producing results. The first daily practice is Reflecting.

One of the key leadership challenges for 2020 and beyond is what I call reflection deficit. We're just not taking enough time as leaders to reflect on why we're doing what we're doing. And, on an even deeper level, whether we're doing the right work in the first place. As a result our teams can be diligently and efficiently working away on precisely the wrong things. I'm sure we're working hard, we might even be working smart, but are we doing the right work?

There are four activities that I see as central to reflecting. You might need to dial up one or more of these activities.

Reflecting leaders:

1. Scan for opportunities and threats. They explore beyond their department, organisation, industry, and geography. They take a look at broader trends.
2. Craft a purpose. They develop and share a clear sense of purpose in the work that's undertaken. They can explain why we do what we do, and why it matters.
3. Establish goals. They stretch teams to aim higher. They are extraordinarily clear about what's expected and they help the team to strive.
4. Formulate a plan. The purpose and goals are clear, so they determine a path to get there.

Perhaps this list has prompted something you could do this week. One thing you could try is simply setting aside more time to reflect. Put it in your calendar on a daily basis. You might be surprised at the benefits.

This bonus episode includes audio from our recent Increase Your Influence Webinar. It includes some research-based and practical tips to increase the influence you have at work. You can find upcoming webinars and recordings of previous webinars at our website, leadership.today