The Blue Pea Leader

Coaching a direct report… ummm. Is this a great idea for today’s leader? The short answer is not always.  A leader should be having a regular conversation to help develop their direct report in line with business needs and the employee’s talent and desires career-wise.

Within these conversations, great leaders are aware of bias and projection from both sides. There are also factors such as level of trust in the relationship and the ability to perceive emerging needs and wants both of the company and of the individual.

I’m becoming more of a fan of pincer coaching for developing your future talent/ high performers quickly.  Here the leader does some of the coaching and an external does the rest.  A sort of 30% / 70% in terms of effort or balance.

An approach that works for the rest of your staff is having another internal leader coach your direct reports. The benefits are they know the business and people they should be connecting to; also, of any impending opportunities.  Plus, it gives the direct report the option to say things they wouldn’t say to the boss for fear of how it might impact their career.  In some cases, direct reports would say the leader is the problem, and so coaching becomes painful as they are having a conversation trying not to say what they want to say.

Ultimately the advantage of an external coach is in helping individuals empower themselves, increase their self-awareness, gain clarity, fresh perspective and move into action that delivers results rather than activities that take them nowhere.  External coaches are a new pair of eyes. There is no agenda or past to navigate, no fear of reprisals if they speak their mind.  Plus, we have practised our questioning and listening skills to a point where we often discover blocks faster.

And here is a key decision point for a leader; any skills require practice be able to do it quicker or better.   A conversation I have with leaders is around the decision about the level of complexity they want to be able to coach.  Small, simple problems require a basic skill in coaching. More significant or complex issues or ones that ask a person to transform rather than change – that requires greater skill.

If those aren’t the conversations you want to have, be honest. Then find your direct report someone (internal or external) who enjoys those conversations and has these skills.  A leader isn’t all things to all people, they have clarity about their strengths and they know others who can do what they can’t.  It’s about knowing your value and where you add value.

I remember years ago someone saying, “oh yes coaching is dead easy, you just ask questions and that’s it, nothing to it” and I’m thinking, yes you ask questions but it’s like great surfers don’t try to ride every wave.

You need to know which bit of the content is the pivot point to question or you can go all around the houses on some merry dog dance and then ‘Oh dear the time is up’.  They leave no further forward and the coach is feeling great because they asked lots of questions.

If anything, coaching is about listening. When I’m teaching leaders coaching skills, we break listening down into its many components and by the time we finished they’re going “well that’s a lot to do”.   And it is, and it takes practice and it’s not every conversation requires that level of listening and attention.

The rewards for the direct report are obvious if they have good coaching by the right person.  The knock-on impact for the business is an engaged, committed, and performing employee.

Inadequate or poor coaching is worse than ineffective, it’s like a disease rotting slowly from the inside. Conversely, good coaching can be effective in bringing growth spurts and significant shifts and these can far outweigh any investment in both time and money.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you.

Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Coaching A Direct Report? A Challenge For Today’s Leader appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

Success strategies; ever Googled it? I know I have. It’s pretty popular! We are all looking for that elusive guide on how to live a successful life, though the truth is it helps if you start off on the right track.

Deciding to set out on the pursuit of some ‘thing’ is a brave decision.  Really.  Many people never make that kind of decision. They think about what they might like to have, they ponder the current problem from many angles (invariably where they are always the innocent party) and then dip their toe in the water to see what might happen.

At the first sign of trouble or resistance, they back off and look for something else.  Recognise any of these elements, in others and yourself? Yes, let’s be honest we’ve all been here.  Does it get you where you want to be though? Well, it didn’t work for me, so I found something else, and this does.

Outcome, goal, objective – these are all ways of describing the overall place you want to be after a period of time and undertaking several actions or tasks.  Think about what you really want / where you want to be?  When you have that, think about it in more detail, put some flesh on the bones.  Your mind really enjoys and benefits from exploring the various permutations of what your outcome might be like.  Some of these permutations will make you go “mmmm” and others “yuck”.  This is important information and enables you to set off down the road with more purpose.

Having met many people who don’t achieve what they want a common factor is not being specific enough about where they want to be e.g. “I want to grow the business by 10%.”  What’s wrong with this you might ask?  Well, what time period are we talking about – 6 months or 2 years?  And what specific element of the business do they want to grow, or perhaps it really is all of their business.  It’s easy when we set ambiguous goals like this without any further thought to either miss them and have lots of reasons why or to fudge the data so that we hit our goal.

Preparation is an important element of achieving what you want.  So what are your options? Spend 2 minutes thinking about it, 20 minutes doing it and 2 years learning and recovering from it?  Nope, didn’t think that would appeal.  When I begin coaching my clients we spend a good 30 minutes exploring what the goal might be.

A few key components include:-

Every time we do something we get a result, this may or may not be the desired result.  Through paying attention to what we do, and what we get back, then we can ascertain what works, what we could do more of, and what we need to change.  Not all results will be desired and certainly, not everyone knows how to give you feedback on your results in a way that is helpful.  However, that doesn’t mean we should just dismiss the feedback as rubbish (tempting though it is).

So what should you be paying attention to when you’re undertaking any change?

In a nutshell, what you say, how you say it, how you behave, and your physiology.  Then you also need to factor in how other people respond to whatever you’re doing.

You have 5 senses through which you gather all information.  Your eyes and ears, your feelings/emotions, taste and smell, the first 3 senses being the most prominent.  None of us operate in isolation, for every action, there is a reaction.  Stay awake, pay attention.  If you don’t pay attention when you experience an increasing amount of pain until finally, you do pay attention.

Equally, when you get feedback from others, listen to what they have to say.  Then distill from it the helpful things which enable you to grow.

If you keep on doing the same thing the same way then you’ll probably get the same result.  Absolutely great if you’re getting what you want.  Otherwise, you need to integrate the learnings you have from the feedback you’re getting and develop alternative ways of moving forward.

Life is an experiment, with only one guarantee, at some point we’ll die.  As long as you believe your new options will harm no one then play, experiment and pay attention to what happens.  Who is the richer person, someone with only one option or someone with 5 options to choose from?  By choosing other approaches, communication styles, and deciding on your attitude, the better your results will be.

Enjoy your experiment!

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you.

Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Success Strategies-How To Get Off On The Right Track appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

Aren’t we all desperate for honest communication in the workplace? None of us want to operate in a silo.  Agility, speed, handling change, adapting, innovating all require us to have a clear picture of what’s really going on and not just what we’d like to think is going on.  To make it harder as we become more and more senior in our leadership (and I’m not meaning old here) there are times when people filter what they say for a whole heap of reasons, including not wanting to disappoint us.

It’s always easier to listen to those who are telling you what you expect to hear, when we hear something we don’t anticipate or don’t like then we sometimes shut down and our ‘tone’ becomes one of telling the other person they’ve messed up or disappointed us.

Here I’ll share my thoughts on how we can productively stay in the conversation and encourage more honesty and information sharing.

Have you ever heard comments like:-

Some of these even seem innocent enough and depending on your relationship with that particular person may even be OK.  However, when other people are part of the conversation things may not always be taken the way we meant.

How do you invite honesty and information sharing, or put another way how do we stay in the conversation when we’ve heard something we don’t like/expect?

Communication let me down

And I’m left here… to use the words of Spandau Ballet.  Communication is most definitely an art form, one I’m still practicing.  What helps me review how well it went or where I think it might have got lost in receipt is remembering what exactly makes up communication.

100% powerful

Words are important clearly when it comes to honest communication. Take a sentence like “you did a great job” and if the tone you say it in (or surround it with in an email) doesn’t match, it’s dismissed, possibly even interpreted as sarcasm or insincerity.  If they can see you whilst you’re saying it, then any mismatch between body language and either tone or words is even greater in impact.

Here’s an even scarier fact; most people in a conversation are in one of two modes, speaking or waiting to speak.  Very few are listening and even fewer are actively listening – a powerful leadership skill which I encourage you to practice and develop.

As a leader, we must remember we don’t have all the answers, and if we do then it’s a sign we:-

“It is good to express a matter in two ways simultaneously, so as to give it both a right foot and a left.  Truth can stand on one leg to be sure; but with two it can walk and get about.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Virtually all the leaders I work with mention being a role model.  As you practice opening up conversations when you hear something unexpected you’ll notice over time others begin to do the same thing.  You’ll also notice that what people share with you and the speed with which they share it shifts.  You can implement all the lean and agile practices you like but without the above it’s only going to take you so far.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you.

Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Honest Communication In The Workplace: Inviting Honesty and Information Sharing appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

Delegation is the name of the game and I want to play that game with you.  Sir Bruce Forsyth obviously never sang it like that but if we want to be the king of our castle we have to learn to delegate – properly.  And I use the word properly because I was asked to design a course for a client as they said we’re delegating, but not getting the results so obviously we’re not doing it right.

Bad or poor delegation can at times cause more problems and damage relationships than if you didn’t delegate at all.  And as some people have experienced that, it’s exactly what they choose to do, not delegate.

Then again sometimes we are our own worst enemy as we buy into common reasons why we should delegate, some even sound rational.  However, before you continue to execute them, or accept them from people you lead, have a double check.

So, here are 4 classic reasons why leaders don’t delegate.

I hear this one so much, “my team is already busy, I don’t want to burden them, it’s not fair.”  My suggestion here is that you check, are they busy on the right things and not still doing tasks that long ago expired in usefulness but are still habits.  Check they’re clear on the key deliverables and goals so they can access their own efficiency and effectiveness.

You probably can, and if you have more experience than them then I would expect this to be the case too.  If the thing you want to delegate is a 1 off then it wouldn’t make sense to invest the time in showing them how to do it.  And after that, you know that practice builds speed.  Plus look at simple maths; 1 hour of your time is more than 1 hour of their time.  Perhaps even if it’s a one-off, if they can do it without your input and it takes a bit longer it could still make sense.  It all depends on what you’re going to be doing with your time.

Now on this one, I like to play devil’s advocate.  You can do it well, but better?  One of the benefits of delegating is a fresh pair of eyes.  There’s your way and their way.  They may do it differently and get the same result.  They may do it differently and get an improved result, eg it could be better, more, faster, innovative or a leap in the outcome.

Should you be feeling at all insecure then you won’t want this to happen.  You hang on or get prescriptive in how things are done.  Yes, there are some thing’s that are defined, prescriptive and creativity and freedom most certainly aren’t appropriate – but I’m not talking about those things here.

What if you saw this as an opportunity to transfer some of your knowledge and wisdom, thereby developing the person in this role, maybe even using the time with them to strengthen your relationship, to better understand their career aspirations in an indirect way.  Perhaps even in the back of your mind ,you’re also thinking about your succession plan.

I know of someone who has been turned down for a promotion because there is no one in his team that can replace him. He was processing is shock and disappointment and wondering what to do to change this. He gave me every reason I’ve just covered.  He thought he was being a good leader by protecting his team. “They really enjoy working with me” and I’m sure that they did.  I asked him, “where have you given them space to surprise you show you what they can really do?”.

“When have you not picked up the pieces for them?”.   His reply “I don’t want them to fail, to lack confidence, they’re really nice people.” My thoughts to him were that it sounded more like he was parenting them rather than leading them. He pondered for a few minutes and said upon reflection he could see how his best intentions were indeed holding everyone back.

Again we need to look beneath the surface of this one.  What is the source of the lack of trust?  I like to explore the 4C’s of trust.  Credibility, Capability, Confidence, Character.

Capability clearly is the easy one.  They don’t yet have the capability, so you decide how you will develop this.  In many other cases, it’s about the quality of the conversation, communication style and ability to set clear expectations – extend the trust and 9 out of 10 people won’t let you down.

Now under the banner of trust upon exploration, we get to the real issue, control.  As in if I give this to another person I’m not in control like I like it to be.  Hone your risk management and decision-making skills.  Learn to let go.  You’ll become better at discerning is this something I need to keep control of, or can you use this as an opportunity to improve the relationship you have with the other person to increase trust between both of you.  Mmm, worth remembering it is a two-way process, what if they don’t trust you as much as you either need or want them to?  It may help if you look at the 4C’s relating to yourself.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Delegation: 4 Crazy Excuses That Leaders Use appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

Resilient leadership and it’s relationship to your culture is a current hot leadership topic. One of the most powerful predictors of our ability to bounce back from difficult times or withstand adversity is the support of others.  As a leader, you need to look at the culture within your team, department, or company and see if it supports resilience or not.

A culture that doesn’t encourage the building of resilience says:

If you want to build a culture that encourages, resilience here are three strategies to implement.

Individuals who feel like they belong in a group have a stronger sense of self-esteem.  If the group behaves like it is a safe environment within which to speak, the individuals are more inclined to feel trust and share their ideas, thoughts, and challenges earlier.

Runners don’t run all the time.  It’s not sprint after sprint, or marathon after marathon.  There is a change of pace and scheduled downtime.

We now live in an always-on society.  Phone, email, ping, swish, beep and if we’re not careful we respond like Pavlovian dogs.  Even in meetings, training, 1:1’s – ping, swish, beep and we shift our focus and attention without scanning the moment to confirm this the best moment to do so.

I’ll leave focus and multi-tasking to another day.  What has been proved regarding human efficiency and effectiveness is we work more productively on long time tasks with contrast.  This contrast could be that we have a difference of speed with which we do things or taking a short subject matter vacation.

If I have a real knotty problem to solve I’ll take it for a long walk.  I’ve even done this with clients I’m coaching.  A change of environment, pace, air somehow seem to do the trick. I deliberately do a version of this on a training program I run, without it the results are not the same.

You may be thinking these ideas don’t seem very business-like and leaving the building isn’t going to work in all situations but think about it.  Within your line of work, what can you support that does allow for some change of pace that gives you and your team members time to pause?

Pauses rejuvenate, allow for reflection, for inspiration to land, for stress and toxins to dissipate.  Never underestimate the power of the pause.

If we don’t trust or know the people we’re in conversation with we are more likely to misinterpret what’s said and not say what we mean (i.e. withhold information or tone it down so much it says nothing).

If someone doesn’t trust you and you ask for their ideas/ thoughts/opinions, what do you think you’re going to get?  Building trust, increasing it, maintaining it even requires real conversations rather than surface ones.

We build these conversations up one at a time and get to know a person much better.  At the beginning of this article I mentioned not saying anything that could be misinterpreted as offensive, how did you react when you read it?  Now there is racism, sexism, and many other isms that are offensive as well as very tiny minded and should not be tolerated.

However, taking offense where non-was intended does impact a person’s resilience. In the end, they become overly sensitive and hard to converse with.  I recently heard in a company that the telling of any jokes and the use of humour should be stopped as not only might the person you say it to be offended but “someone over-hearing might find it offensive”.

Here is another example, I have a Yorkshire accent, sometimes people tease me about how I say words.  Experience means I can generally tell whether someone is teasing me from affection or building connection and those people who are just being rude.  If I’m not sure I’ll have a conversation with the person to clarify or if it is rude to give them feedback.

As a leader be aware of your position, as people may not always let you know how they took it, and yes feedback helps us learn how something was received and where collectively or situationally something is appropriate or not.

We learn what was said with the intention of malice, offense, or small-mindedness through experience.

No one should have to accept or tolerate malice, that is not healthy resilience.   However, when it wasn’t meant that way, but we were hurt then through having a conversation and allowing for reflection, we offer the opportunity to all parties to grow in awareness and resilience.

I’m am witnessing an increase in conversations between middle-tier leaders who are saying it’s best to stay bland.  They have zero intention of saying anything with malice but just in case better play safe than offer up an opinion.

They are also saying there is an increase in the lack of trust.  If we stay on the surface we don’t demonstrate real conversations, we don’t run the risk of being misunderstood, we don’t connect.  We are role modelling a lack of resilience because it is a lack of resilience that says I’ll shy away from all of this.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Resilient Leadership: Building A Resilient Culture appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

[Please excuse any typing errors as this is a direct transcription for your benefit.]

Hello, this is Ruth Sanderson from Blue Pea POD. In this podcast, I want to talk about mental agility, specifically, being open-minded. Being open-minded is one of the common responses that come up when I ask leaders about the key attitudes they think leaders should have.

We like to believe we are open-minded, and it’s highly probable that we think we’re actually more open-minded than we are in actual truth are!

I say this because we’re a collection of habits, patterns, repetitions. For example, the commute to work each day quickly becomes routine, and we stop observing everything. Consider your last seven breakfasts. How different and varied were they? When we food shop we’re deciding what we’ll eat. Maybe on a Saturday, we go, “Let’s try something new for a change.” I wonder how you prepare this strange looking fruit or vegetable.

We often make decisions based on familiar data. Now for some simple or low-risk decisions, that’s absolutely fine, but without awareness, we make larger, or more complex decisions still relying on our favorite routes. We don’t always stop, think, search for new sources of data or analyze other options.

For example, when I have an HR decision, I might rely on discussing it with Julie, an expert in that field. I know Julie, we get on really well. However, is that enough to remain open-minded to other options? What other avenues have I explored? How open am I too new or different, or conflict, or disagreement?

This is possible. I know Julie. We get on really well. I go to her because I think I know the answer I’m going to get whereas if I went to somebody else I may get that different, that conflict, that disagreement.

Now because I can argue that in the name of speed and cost, my approach is sufficient. It may well be, but it isn’t necessarily me demonstrating an attitude or receptivity to being open-minded or practicing mental agility.

I know a company making cost savings who decided to cut their training budget. It was announced as all unnecessary expenditure must be stopped. They haven’t tracked the return on investment for their training budget and neither did they explore other options of developing their staff.

Training and development equaled unnecessary expense, that’s it. Now a year down the line some staff left including a couple of key people, and they were struggling to replace them. They left because they weren’t growing in their role, or they were expected to grow just without any guidance or support. Somehow they were expected to know stuff and be able to apply it.

Now aside from people leaving, staff engagement was also down in the annual survey. They cited reasons such as a lack of support to do their role and increasing blame culture and no clear development opportunities.

Now, fortunately, somebody new came in and looked at what was going on. They realized that learning and development were important and whilst they didn’t have lots of money to invest, they were open-minded to explore new routes to creating learning and development opportunities. The pressure on us to make good decisions quickly can cause us to focus on one goal at the blind expense of another. We don’t necessarily see all the links, consequences, and impact until too late.

Ask yourself, have I considered this from all angles, not just my preferred angles? Some of us are very task focused, others people focused. Some of us do both. Have I considered the impact of this choice on the customer, the product, or service, the infrastructure, the employees, the market and competition, future trends, company culture? As you know, that’s not an exhaustive list, but it stops you falling into ruts. If you use it a checklist, then too, basically at some point it is going to become a rut.

A few other questions you can ask yourself is, what’s new here? What am I missing? What am I ignoring? The useful questions that keep us open-minded and of course, you have to stay tuned for the answers and not just shut down if they’re not what you wanted to hear.

Being brutally honest with yourself is a trait authentic leaders hone. It allows you to more fully own who you are and embody what you stand for. If you use the words role model or inspire in your vocabulary about leadership, then increasing your mental agility is crucial for you. Until the next time, I wish you authentic success.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialing various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package are designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Mental Agility and Open Mindedness appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

[Please excuse any typing errors as this is a direct transcription for your benefit.]

Hi, this is Ruth Sanderson from Blue Pea POD and in this podcast, I want to pose the question: Are you an intrepid explorer?

I like to think we all have a bit of explorer in us, now. Maybe it’s generational, and over the last few hundred years, our ancestors have sought out and explored new frontiers, new continents and countries. Columbus, Captain James Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and when they’ve explored planet Earth, then it was a case of, “Let’s go into space and look at Mars or the moon!” Now, in our own way, we do a bit of exploring on bits of Earth that are new for us personally, when we travel to a new city or country.

Holidays are our unadulterated explorer time. We post our experiences and findings on Facebook and Instagram. It’s fun, but is it intrepid exploration? “Space, the final frontier,” according Captain Kirk, or was it Spock? I forget. One of those. Anyways, it is, but it’s the space between our ears, the space behind our eyes that’s the final frontier. Exploring this space is intrepid stuff.

Self-awareness; which is what happens as you explore this space, isn’t for the faint-hearted. Years of training, coaching and consulting have shown me that not everybody wants to do it, and some will go to extraordinary efforts to remain unaware. Actually, years of increasing my own self-awareness and exploring my own space behind my eyes have been peppered with moments of joy and revelation; moments of tension when I wondered what was going to snap, and moments of quiet acknowledgement and ownership.

Increasing your self-awareness requires the intrepid explorer in you, and you don’t have to go in unprepared. Again, we can learn from previous explorers. Scott trotted off to the Antarctic and failed to properly prepare, made poor decision after poor decision, and him and his team paid with their lives. Poor decisions come from a lack of awareness and your self might be an element of that.

It was probably Scott’s mentality more than anything else that doomed his expedition. So the results you’re currently experiencing in your life, your business, relationships, are directly proportional to your current level of awareness. We can look at external out there, and be aware of market data, consumer habits, share price, et cetera, et cetera. We may even be aware of the shift in somebody’s face as we say something, or even notice their energy change. And without a corresponding level of self-awareness, would we know what to do with the information?

Many of the questions we seek to answer help us be more authentic. These questions are ones like: Who am I? What’s my purpose? How best do I align my purpose with the purpose of my organization? In uncertainty, how do I navigate and make decisions that keep us on track, healthy, and confident? What’s important to me about my career? And just how do I express this? As a leader, I’m a role model for future leaders, but what am I inspiring?

See, we can so easily get caught up in the business of business; that we don’t make the space to explore what’s going in our mind, our self, our inner-terrain. Typically, over the course of a six month, one year working relationship that I can have with a client, we work on both actual business results and their inner space, their inner-terrain; increasing their self-awareness and inner strength.

Now, when this started out, many just wanted the business results. Anything else would be the cherry on the cake. But at the end, the biggest, most rewarding element, they said, was their inner strength had increased so much that they got the business results, but they also had the confidence and clarity to go forward for so much more. It was their intrepid explorer, it was now alive and kicking from tears of what was possible. What was possible to achieve in business has expanded because they had expanded.

So if you want to achieve more, contribute more. Be more. Let the intrepid explorer within you out more. It is through journeying within that you create more on the outside. Until next time. Enjoy exploring.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package is designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Intrepid Exploration appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

[Please excuse any typing errors as this is a direct transcription for your benefit.]

When there are times of high change, unknown, uncertainty, flux and a bucket load of problems just waiting for solutions; it’s easy to hunker down.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed, demotivated and then we have a choice.  To try and solve a few more problems in the hope it stabilises things; if you’re optimistic, improves things. Or switch off and ride out this wave of flux.

As leaders we have conversations that aim to engage, motivate, collaborate and we also have any plates to keep spinning.  There is a tier of leadership in organisations that is doing the best they can to keep the bulk of the employees engaged, driven and committed every day; and not being the primary decision makers, they’re sense making the changes cascading down and applying either the best they know how for their team or doing it as prescribed, which in some cases gives very little wiggle room and is experienced as dictation without context.

These leaders seek the guidance to successfully implement change and embed in their unit.  One of the things I share with leaders is how to create a vision that will inspire.  Because it is so easy to get lost and feel like nothing’s going to make a difference and of course that’s not the case.

Watching leaders come alive as they imagine an exciting, highly attractive future for their company, department or team is one of the pleasures I get to see on a regular basis.  It’s rejuvenating for them and they return to their people with more vim and vigour as well as a vision they either want to implement or share as a straw man and create from there.

I recently saw a senior leader share his message with a group of leaders who were committed to the company and looking for ways to increase engagement within their teams as recent surveys showed it had significantly dropped.  At the end of the session he left happy; they were asking me how else they could have bridged the disconnection with him.  The problem was the senior leader hadn’t been actively listening.  He was in love with his idea, he just wasn’t seeing the bigger picture or taking time to connect.  On the other side I’ve seen leaders do this so well that individuals who had confided in me that they were considering alternative options elsewhere were now on board and actively contributing.

You can create a vision, but it can’t only be you driving the vision.  Let me leave you with another benefit of having a team inspired by a vision.  On more than one occasion I’ve had feedback from leaders that following them sharing their vision with their people, stress levels fell, along with less absenteeism.  People now had a future that was compelling enough they could tolerate the current situation, they asked better questions in the context of the future and felt more resourced to deal with what was happening.

Until next time, go and be the difference in leadership.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package is designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post The Power Of Vision appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

[Please excuse and typing errors. This is a direct transcription of the podcast for your benefit.]

In this podcast, I want to talk about what if you’re not prepared to get it wrong? Which might seem a little odd, but I do see people go through a stage where they don’t want to get ‘it’ wrong.

Yet, if we have this fear that we don’t want to get it wrong, we will never create anything new.

We won’t improve our decision-making skills. We won’t push our mental boundaries, and we certainly won’t inspire others.

So confession time: I do dislike getting things wrong, making mistakes, totally screwing things up at times, most so when these things matter to me, and I really have to watch out for this, because there are moments when I’m aware that I’m making the choice to stay safe and play small.

The crazy thing is, I know that I learn more and faster when I’m not quite getting it right; when I’m experimenting and testing hypothesis, tools, techniques, or ideas.

Especially when I’m experimenting and testing.

I’m fine with errors and mistakes and things not working out first time or even the fifth time if each time I’m incorporating the feedback and data into my next interaction and attempt

…….. but I’ve noticed that sometimes my mindset isn’t so experimental. Sometimes my demands on myself leave no room for error, and then I’m not performing at my best, I might think I am, but I’m not!

Sometimes it’s easier to see the truth of this in others than ourselves.

There is a program that I run in which leaders set themselves goals they will achieve by the end of the week. What’s more, they’re going to be appraised of their performance that week.

Now, they do have some appreciation of the material they will be learning, but don’t know everything because if they did; why would they be there?

So, two goals related to the course fulfilled by the end of the week and the fun begins because some set passive goals; “I will understand collaborative leadership”.

All right, some set comfortable goals. They know that they can do it. They just want others to confirm they can.

Some set goals with a very predefined stretch in there, but they think they can do it, so “I will successfully practice giving difficult developmental feedback to one person” and others go, “Here’s my goal and as of now, I have got no idea how I’ll do it or if I’ll hit the success criteria I’ve picked, but I’m going to do it.”

What’s different is for some, the score at the end of the week matters, so they set goals they believe will allow them to get the score. Usually, they want to exceed so they’ve held back on the goal, so they can hopefully impress their peers.

Those who set stretching goals are more focused on learning, improving, and being a better leader back in their team or department. They’re seeking to learn from others and not just theoretically do something conceptual.

At the end, it’s not about the score, and they sometimes get that realization at the end. It’s not about the score. It’s about what they got from the week, and you hear less excuses as they go through the course.

However, the ones that set the stretching goals, not knowing how they were going to do it are also the participants who come to me at breaks and at lunch to ask questions.

I’d hear them run ideas past other people or myself. They’d ask for feedback, observations. They were richly seeking to practice and learn.

And at the end, I’ve never had anyone who stretched themselves, the ones who were prepared to make mistakes say they wish they had set smaller goals.

However, I have seen several who wished they’d put more skin in the game, even though they were offered those opportunities along the way……

At those choice points, getting it right was more important than getting the learnings that were on offer, and this is one of the learnings I reflect to them.

What you did this week, what’s your version of that back in the workplace?

Because they think it’s how often do you operate to be right rather than operate for results. In other words, are you putting the cart before the horse?

Is my thinking, what’s my desired results right now? What do I need to do? Know, prepare and then move into action, or is my thinking I want to get it right here. I want to get it right, so given what I know and can do, what action will I take?

Results don’t necessarily tend to feature.

Now in reality: we do both. Our development and growth are becoming more aware of which one we are ‘doing’ and under what circumstances and then we can spot our habits and patterns.

Now, if we’ve had a series of knocks, it’s easy to seek being right or getting it right because our confidence needs a boost and of course there are other ways we could do this; increasing our resilience being just one.

When that’s stronger, we’re more inclined to be okay with errors and pushing the boundaries. Until next time, go and experiment a bit more.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package is designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Getting It Wrong Versus Getting It Right? A Dilemma appeared first on Blue Pea POD.

[Please excuse and typing errors. This is a direct transcription of the podcast for your benefit.]

Hello there. This is Ruth Sanderson from Blue Pea POD, and in this podcast, I want to talk about being respected. As a leader, we can hope that our title will bring respect. Now, of course, we know that that isn’t true. Very few titles are fully respected. King, queen, but after that, it gets a bit thin, so we want to be respected, and of course, we want to demonstrate respect for others.

Now, you earn respect through your qualities, characteristics, through what you do and what you say, consistently.  Moreover, if I’m being pedantic here, it’s about the qualities, skills, knowledge, actions, and words you are perceived to do consistently because of course there’s how we would describe yourself, and then there’s how others experience us and describe us.  If someone is being professionally respectful, there are general culturally accepted basics that occur, and of course what we really want is for there to be a genuine respect for us, which of course only happens as people get to know us, and genuine respect is demonstrated by what people say about you when you’re not there.  Leaders desire for their team to be proactive, to come with solutions to problems, not just bring them the problem, to trust them.  Without real respect for you, that isn’t going to happen. Take the art of delegation.  It’s more than just a process.  The success of this is linked to the respect others have for you, the ability to make things happen, respect.

Firstly then, you can take time to review where you think you are regarding respect, so for example, whose respect do you have? How robust is this? What do people say about you? Whose respect have you yet to gain and why is it important to you?

Now, a slight aside here, because I’ve coached people around respect, and on the odd occasion they’ve been discussing gaining the respect of somebody and what they’ve tried, etc, to get it to happen. When I ask this particular question, why is it important for you that this person respects you, sometimes the startling realisation is, it isn’t. Either it’s another person’s viewpoint or agenda, or the person has a 100% rule. “Everyone; I should have gained everyone’s respect.” My question is, do you have to respect everyone? As you view your level of respect, you can also ask yourself, “How do I know what I’ve written to be valid? What do people say about me when I’m not there? How consistent am I?”

Now, we know it’s not all about us because respect is something we show to others. We want to be respected genuinely and to genuinely respect others, so what happens if we don’t respect somebody? What then? Well, let’s start with some brutal honesty. Do you want to respect them? Again, why is this important to you? Knowing the answer to that, there are several routes you can go down. Now, today I’m going to share just one.

So, what’s the quality, skills, knowledge, actions, behaviours, and words that this person demonstrates? And then, what would you like to see them demonstrate that would gain your respect? With the second list in mind, have you ever seen them do anything on that list even once? And what feedback could you give them that would encourage an increase of what you’d like to see? If you look for what you would like to see and remain open to finding it, all is well and good, but this is different to somebody saying, “I’d like to see them apologise if they make a mistake, but that’s never going to happen.” It’s like saying, “I want to see X, but I don’t expect it. I’m closed to the possibility that it could happen.”

So again, another story. A guy I was mentoring said one of his peers never apologised at all and it was something he wanted to see. Over lunch we were all having a conversation, all chatting away, and twice I heard this particular person apologise. When I asked my client about our lunch conversations, he’d missed both apologies. Now, once the blinkers were removed, he noticed it more and their relationship got stronger. So, if you want your team to be respected, then think about how you want them to be described, and we’re back to consistency, so what can you support them in so that they can do it consistently? What can you reinforce, so it becomes consistent? The benefit of this is that as genuine respect increases, so does trust.

Until the next time, go and be the difference in leadership.

Thanks,

Ruth

Time is a precious commodity, and you don’t want to waste it or any other resources trialling various programmes to see what might have content and insights that work for you. Leadership can feel like a lonely role especially in times of high change and uncertainty, and it’s good to have a sounding board and someone with experience of leadership and business.

Maybe there are challenges you want to resolve and goals you want to achieve right now?

Our VIP ½ day or 1-day coaching and mentoring package is designed to give you the confidence, clarity and action plan you need to get the desired results you want.

Spend ½ – 1 day with Ruth (either in person or on the phone) and move from chaos to clarity.  To discover if this is the right investment for you at this moment in your leadership journey contact us and we’ll arrange a conversation.

The post Give Me A Little Respect appeared first on Blue Pea POD.